NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/lang/c++-part1/2859

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-06 | 1.6 KB

Path: mail2news.demon.co.uk!genesis.demon.co.uk
From: Lawrence Kirby <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Hungarian notation
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 96 01:34:49 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]>
           [e-mail] "Mike Rubenstein" writes:

>I'm sure Lawrence is aware of this, but it's worth noting that while
>casting to long double is almost certainly safe in that it will not
>cause damage, it may not print out anything useful.  It's possible
>that time_t is an integral type that cannot be represented exactly as
>a long double and the least significant bits, that are lost in the
>conversion, may be significant.

As Dan has pointed out long double is the only type you can use and be
sure that it doesn't result in undefined behaviour. While loss of
precision is possible the chances of this happening in practice are small.
Of course you have to answer what the use is for printing out a time_t
value. Most likely that is for debugging or it assumes a particular
format. At any rate the result is inherently system specific.

--
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Lawrence Kirby | [e-mail]
Wilts, England | [e-mail]
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