What is the precision of long double in C++?
Does anyone know how to find out the precision of long double
on a specific platform? I appear to be losing precision after 17 decimal digits, which is the same as when I just use double
. I would expect to get more, since double
is represented with 8 bytes on my platform, while long double
is 12 bytes.
Before you ask, this is for Project Euler, so yes I do need more than 17 digits. :)
EDIT: Thanks for the quick replies. I just confirmed that I can only get 18 decimal digits by using long double
on my system.
You can find out with std::numeric_limits
:
#include <iostream> // std::cout
#include <limits> // std::numeric_limits
int main(){
std::cout << std::numeric_limits<long double>::digits10 << std::endl;
}
You can use <cfloat>. Specifically:
LDBL_DIG