There are some operations that are too complicated or expensive to perform by hand on floating-point numbers. ISO C99 defines functions to do these operations, which mostly involve changing single bits.
— Function: float copysignf (float x, float y)
— Function: long double copysignl (long double x, long double y)
These functions return x but with the sign of y. They work even if x or y are NaN or zero. Both of these can carry a sign (although not all implementations support it) and this is one of the few operations that can tell the difference.
copysign
never raises an exception.This function is defined in IEC 559 (and the appendix with recommended functions in IEEE 754/IEEE 854).
signbit
is a generic macro which can work on all floating-point types. It returns a nonzero value if the value of x has its sign bit set.This is not the same as
x < 0.0
, because IEEE 754 floating point allows zero to be signed. The comparison-0.0 < 0.0
is false, butsignbit (-0.0)
will return a nonzero value.
— Function: float nextafterf (float x, float y)
— Function: long double nextafterl (long double x, long double y)
The
nextafter
function returns the next representable neighbor of x in the direction towards y. The size of the step between x and the result depends on the type of the result. If x = y the function simply returns y. If either value isNaN
,NaN
is returned. Otherwise a value corresponding to the value of the least significant bit in the mantissa is added or subtracted, depending on the direction.nextafter
will signal overflow or underflow if the result goes outside of the range of normalized numbers.This function is defined in IEC 559 (and the appendix with recommended functions in IEEE 754/IEEE 854).
— Function: float nexttowardf (float x, long double y)
— Function: long double nexttowardl (long double x, long double y)
These functions are identical to the corresponding versions of
nextafter
except that their second argument is along double
.
— Function: float nanf (const char *tagp)
— Function: long double nanl (const char *tagp)
The
nan
function returns a representation of NaN, provided that NaN is supported by the target platform.nan ("
n-char-sequence")
is equivalent tostrtod ("NAN(
n-char-sequence)")
.The argument tagp is used in an unspecified manner. On IEEE 754 systems, there are many representations of NaN, and tagp selects one. On other systems it may do nothing.