Floating point minimum values are positive?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 09:39:05AM +0200, David wrote:
> > There are some floats that can go even smaller than this, but they
> > are "denormal" and may incur a large runtime overhead (they are
> > intended to prevent underflow / minimize loss of precision in
> > certain computations involving very small quantities, and aren't
> > supposed to be used in normal calculations).
> 
> We were taught something else in university.
> Small overhead, though CPUs can handle them (not software implemented)
> and they are used when needed, you can't choose to use it or not to use it.

Well, I learned this from Wikipedia, so I'm not 100% sure whether or not
it's accurate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denormal_number#Performance_issues


T

-- 
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