what does it mean if a variable is a "double?"?

Question

It's a very basic programming question. I'm just new to the basic principles of programming and don't know what variable types are. If someone could explain that, that would be terrific.

Answer 1

yes. there are singles,doubles, shorts, integers, to name a few.



this indicates the number of bits these numbers are stored in. This really translates into how many digits, after the decimal point, exist, or how large a positive and negative number may be stored in that variable.. An integer is a real whole number.



Google double numbers.



TexMav

Answer 2

The "double" is one of the floating point types defined by IEEE-754, the standard which defines how floating-point numbers are represented in computers that use binary digits (bits) to store values.



The name "double" was used in the 1985 revision of the standard, but was deprecated and is officially called "binary64" since 2008, although of course most computer languages are going to call it "double" forever. Besides double precision, IEE 754 specifies single and half precision floating point values.



Wikipedia has decent articles on this topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_precision_floating-point_format

Answer 3

A double is any real number: positive or negitive, and not necessarily a whole number.

For example:

-5.1358

68

1000.235

-1

and so on