How floats are stored in C compiler?

In C programming language, float is a short term for floating point.

Floating point numbers are generally represented in the form of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) format.
The IEEE format uses a sign bit, a mantissa and an exponent for representing the power of 2.
The sign bit denotes the sign of the number: a 0 represents a positive value and a 1 denotes a negative value.
The mantissa represented in binary after converting into its normalized form. After normalization mantissa, the most significant digit is always 1.
The exponent is an integer stored in unsigned binary format after adding a positive integer bias.
This ensures that the stored exponent is always positive.
For float, the bias is 127 and for doubles, the bias is 1023.

Example

Following is the C program for rounding the floating point number to four decimal places in C language −

#include <stdio.h>
int main(){
   float var = 37.66666;
   printf("%.4f", var);// rounding to four decimal points
   return 0;
}

When the above program is executed, it produces the following result −

37.6667

Following is the C program for rounding floating point number to eight decimal places in C language −

#include <stdio.h>
int main(){
   float var = 78.67;
   printf("%.8f", var);
   return 0;
}

When the above program is executed, it produces the following result −

78.66999817

Published on 09-Mar-2021 16:28:16