What does double means?

I am learning Primitive Data Types and i came up to double so would someone explain what double actually do?

And by double i mean :

double foo = 3.14;

Code (markup):

or what's the difference between floats and double? i got a little bit confused and i would really appreciate it if you could give a hand of help.

float foo = 3.14f;

Code (markup):

 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5098558/float-vs-double-precision

 

The main difference between the two is in the size of the numbers that they hold. For float its up to 7 digits number. For doubles its up to 16 digits. To be more precise, here's the official size:

float: 1.5 × 10-45 to 3.4 × 1038
double: 5.0 × 10-324 to 1.7 × 10308

 

float: .net framework is single, bytes : 4 , Values: Approx. ±1.5 x 10-45 to ±3.4 x 1038 with 7 significant figures
Double : .net framework is double, bytes::8, values : Approx. ±5.0 x 10-324 to ±1.7 x 10308 with 15 or 16 significant figures

 

thank you very much for your help guys i really appreciate that

 

1)Double hold more value than Float
2)Double takes 15-16 digit where as float approximately takes 7 digit
3)if you want check what is maximum size of double write this code in console application
double d =0;
console.writeline("Max value ={0}",Double.MaxValue)
console.writeline("Max value ={1}",Double.MinValue)
4)you can check same with float

 

That's a very... convoluted way to differ FLOAT and DOUBLE. They do exactly the same thing, it's just that DOUBLE is exactly that - double precision. I recommend just reading the specs, for instance here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/floating-point-types.html and here: http://code.rohitink.com/2013/06/12/mysql-integer-float-decimal-data-types-differences/
Neither is good for financial content (then one should use DECIMAL), and both FLOAT and DOUBLE can be set up when creating the column, with how many digits should be allowed before and after the decimal point.

 

Actually @PoPSiCLe, decimal is HORRIBLE for tracking financial if taxes are involved -- see "rounding bug"... NOT that floats are much better...

I find it a laugh when C syntax languages say "float" when they mean "single" . It's like going into a restaurant where they only have two sizes, medium and large.

It's also a little funny how few programmers even grasp how it works, and still THINK in decimal even when the computer doesn't. It comes down to how many BITS are assigned to what task:

https://standards.ieee.org/findstds/standard/754-1985.html

It's pretty simple:
Single: (per IEEE 754-1985)
1 bit sign
8 bits exponent
23 bits data

Double: (per IEEE 754-1985)
1 bit sign
11 bits exponent
52 bits data

Another common one is "extended" -- it's 80 bit, was created for internal use on the 8087 but is accepted as a standard for high precision.
1 bit sign
15 bits exponent
64 bits data

Of course it's REAL fun when you start switching between languages and some use a 6 bit float (called a "REAL"), processors of different families that went and used their own proprietary formats.

Or arbitrary precision numbers, where a 16, 32 or 64 bit number is used for the float, separate from a data storage that could be ANY length -- quite often done using BCD instead of byte-packed binary. Some languages have it built in like LISP, Smalltalk and Haskell. Java has bigDecimal and bigInteger so you can go any length as either... laughably C# only has bigInteger with no floating point equivalent.

Then there's the REAL fun when computers store irrational numbers as fractions. See the 384 bit system used on some Cray supercomputers; 128 bits of integer, 128 bits of numerator and 128 bits of denominator, with a hardware reducer for 2, 3, 5, 7 and 11.

I've been a little surprised that we don't see more fractional systems used on todays hardware; integer math is so much simpler than floating point in terms of implementing it on silicon, that say... 128 bits of 64:32:32 would blow floating point out of the water on speed whilst still having many MANY times higher precision, many "irrational" numbers being able to be absolutely stated. See 0::1/3 or 0::2/7 -- try stating those as absolutes with floating point.

In most fractional computer systems you use a double colon to separate the integer component from the fraction. Nope, I've NEVER programmed in Ada... that's my story and I'm shticking to it!

 

With Float maybe you enter values in % and Double is for storing more value and takes memory space, if you want to make programs small then may see some specs like bigger data type makes program runs slow in CPU when working with real world programs and developing Softwares for MAC/PC etc.

 

double is a data type which can store decimal values.