binary precision in octave

[John W. Eaton]

On 26-Mar-1998, (Ted Harding) <address@hidden> wrote:

| Can anyone tell me the binary precision to which numbers are stored
| in octave?  (I.e. the number of bits in the mantissa, ignoring
| exponent and any flag bits, i.e. a number between 0 and 1 is stored
| to N-bit precision).  The size of "eps" suggest N=52.

Octave uses whatever double precision floating point format your
system uses.  These days, for most every system on which Octave runs,
that means it uses the IEEE 64-bit floating point format.

If you're interested in more details about the characteristics of the
floating point arithmetic on your system, I'd recommend running the
paranoia program, available from http://www.netlib.org/paranoia/index.html.

jwe