I use strtod, and I have never had the author’s requirement to detect that a small number has underflowed to 0.
From my perspective, strtod returns an approximation: the floating point number closest to the number described by the digit string. If the floating point number closest to the numeral is 0, it returns that. I don’t have a use case where choosing 0 as the approximation needs to be handled differently from choosing some other float as the approximation. In what circumstance is this particular case an “error” when returning an approximate non-zero result is not an error?
I think the author has a specialized need that may not be encountered by most people. In these cases I just use a third party library, as the standard C library doesn’t cover all use cases for which you may need a library function.
I use
strtod, and I have never had the author’s requirement to detect that a small number has underflowed to 0.From my perspective, strtod returns an approximation: the floating point number closest to the number described by the digit string. If the floating point number closest to the numeral is 0, it returns that. I don’t have a use case where choosing 0 as the approximation needs to be handled differently from choosing some other float as the approximation. In what circumstance is this particular case an “error” when returning an approximate non-zero result is not an error?
I think the author has a specialized need that may not be encountered by most people. In these cases I just use a third party library, as the standard C library doesn’t cover all use cases for which you may need a library function.
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