Re: [GD-General] FLT_MIN

[Colin F. <cp...@ea...>]

> Ok, I found this in the MSDN :
> _control87( _EM_INVALID, _MCW_EM ); // DENORMAL is unmasked by this call

Hey, that's neat!

> As long as it works well, I think I'm going to
> allow denormalized numbers. Any known problems
> with this ?

Loss of precision. 1.4E-45 has one bit
of precision!  So, in this extreme case you can
have up to 50% error in precision, but at least the
order of magnitude is still sane.  You can have
exact powers of two all the way down to (2^(-149))
without loss of precision of course.


> That's a very subtle (and interesting IMHO) bug that happens only because
of
> a combination of bad things :

Yes, this is very interesting.  I didn't even know
about denormalized floats until you mentioned this
mystery and I did some research, but now I can see
that it is something to be aware of.

--- Colin