> With IEEE FP numbers, the product of the smallest and biggest non-null non-inf... | Hacker News

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adgjlsfhk1 89 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: It's OK to compare floating-points for equality

> With IEEE FP numbers, the product of the smallest and biggest non-null non-infinite numbers is no longer approximately 1, but it is approximately 4.

This is just wrong? The largest Float64 is 1.7976931348623157e308 and the smallest is 5.0e-324 They multiply to ~1e-16.

meindnoch 89 days ago [–]

>the smallest is 5.0e-324

That's a subnormal [1]. The smallest normal double is 2.22507e-308:

  DBL_MIN          = 2.22507e-308
  DBL_TRUE_MIN     = 4.94066e-324

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subnormal_number

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