How does that work? Is it just because double uses more bits? I'd imagine for the same number of bits, you can store more ints than doubles (assuming you want the ints to be exact values).

[–] nile@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago (12 children)

No, it has an exponent component: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-precision_floating-point_format

[–] karlthemailman@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

No, I get that. I'm sure the programming language design people know what they are doing. I just can't grasp how a double (which has to use at least 1 bit to represent whether or not there is a fractional component) can possibly store more exact integer vales than an integer type of the same length (same number of bits).

It just seems to violate some law of information theory to my novice mind.

[–] nile@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Oh now I get what you mean, and like others mentioned, yeah it's more bits :)

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