Double Precision Floating-point Format

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online.In computing, a double precision is a usually binary floating-point computer numbering format that occupies 8 bytes in computer memory.In IEEE 754-2008 the 64-bit base 2 format is officially referred to as binary64. It was called double in IEEE 754-1985.One of the first programming languages to provide single- and double-precision floating- point data types was Fortran. Before the wide-spread adoption of IEEE 754-1985, the representation and properties of the double float data type depended on the computer manufacturer and computer model.Double precision floating point provides a relative precision of about 16 decimal digits and magnitude range from about 10-308 to about 10+308. In computers that have 64-bit floating-point arithmetic units, most numerical computing is done in double-precision floating point, since the use of single- precision provides little speed advantage.Double precision is known as double in C, C++ and Java.