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Message: [QUOTE="Tim Prince, post: 1714381"] On a machine with no bias in the exponent, without a hidden mantissa bit, all-bits-zero is an un-normalized floating point zero. As such machines did not have gradual underflow, performing arithmetic between such operands and other operands of magnitude < 0.5 gave truncated results. For example, had <float.h> been implemented at that time, 0.9*LDBL_EPSILON + <all-bits-zero> would give 0.0. One of the early C implementations (gcos) was on such a machine. I over-simplify, since "long double" was not supported as a memory storage data type, only in register. [/QUOTE]