DOUBLE

DOUBLE is one of the basic data types supported by the VPL programming language from firmware version 5.00 / R1.30.00.

A DOUBLE can hold double-precision floating-point values in the range  ±2.23E-308 .. ±1.8E308 with a precision of approx. 16 decimal digits. A DOUBLE data type occupies 8 bytes of storage.

The DOUBLE data type is based on the IEEE 754 standard, and can – in addition to the floating-point values – contain two kinds of error values, ±infinity and NaN (Not a Number).

These error values will be returned from some math functions and calculations if the result is out of range, or if the calculation is invalid, e.g. due to division by zero.

If a sub-calculation returns an error value, the entire calculation will return an error value, which can be checked with IsInf and IsNaN.

It is possible to transparently mix DOUBLE and FLOAT without explicit type-conversion. Loss of precision will occur when assigning a DOUBLE to a FLOAT variable.

Any constant floating point value will be handled as a single precision FLOAT.