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To: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 04 Aug 2005 12:49:59 EDT."
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Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2005 10:08:14 -0700
From: Bakul Shah <bakul@BitBlocks.com>
Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Steve Kargl <sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Number of significand bits in long double? 
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> PROPERTIES OF LONG DOUBLE
> Base = 2
> Significant base digits = 53 (= at least 15 decimal digits)

$ cat x.c
#include <machine/float.h>
static double x = DBL_MAX;
static long double min = LDBL_MIN;
static long double max = LDBL_MAX;

$ gcc -S x.c

$ cat x.s
        .file   "x.c"
        .data
        .p2align 3
        .type   x, @object
        .size   x, 8
x:
        .long   -1
        .long   2146435071
        .p2align 4
        .type   min, @object
        .size   min, 12
min:
        .long   0
        .long   -2147483648
        .long   1
        .p2align 4
        .type   max, @object
        .size   max, 12
max:
        .long   0
        .long   -2147483648
        .long   32767
        .ident  "GCC: (GNU) 3.4.4 [FreeBSD] 20050518"

So this indicates long double is 15 bits of exponent, 64 bits of mantissa.