[issue9980] str(float) failure

[Mark Dickinson]

Mark Dickinson <dickinsm at gmail.com> added the comment:

> For example C# uses 80 bit precision

No, I don't think that's true.  It uses the x87, with its 64-bit internal precision, but I'm fairly sure that (as is almost always true in a Windows environment, except if you're using Delphi, apparently) the FPU precision is still set to 53-bit precision.

> if I understand http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidnotario/archive/2005/08/08/449092.aspx well.

And that article explicitly confirms the use of 53-bit precision:

"Precision is set by default in VC++ and CLR apps to ‘double precision’, which means that if you are operating with operands of type float, results of operations done with floats actually exist in the x87 stack as if there were of type double. In fact, it’s even weirder than that. They will have the mantissa of a double, but the range (exponent) of an extended double (80 bit)."

i.e., it's using the x87 FPU with precision set to 53 bits.

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