Hi Rohit!
* Rohit Saily <rohit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, 2020-05-16, 18:04:
I am having difficulty understanding a sentence in the PRINTF(3) man
page's explanation of the 'a' and 'A' conversion specifiers, more
specifically it is the following sentence:
The digit before the decimal point is unspecified for nonnormalized
numbers, and nonzero but other‐wise unspecified for normalized
numbers.
My confusion arises due to the fact that the two posible cases are
described with the same outcome,
I believe the wording is correct. The outcome is not always the same:
the leading digit zero is allowed only for non-normalized numbers.
For example, printf("%a", 1.0) could produce any of these outputs:
0x8.0p-3
0x4.0p-2
0x2.0p-1
0x1.0p+0
but not:
0x0.8p+1
On the other hand, assuming the IEEE 754 binary64 format,
printf("%a\n", 0x0.8p-1022) could produce any of these:
0x8.0p-1026
0x4.0p-1025
0x2.0p-1024
0x1.0p-1023
0x0.8p-1022
--
Jakub Wilk
