As the parent already said, the nice thing about hexadecimal floating-point is that the standard MANDATES that you get exactly the float/double you have uniquel

As the parent already said, the nice thing about hexadecimal floating-point is that the standard MANDATES that you get exactly the float/double you have uniquely described. The assertion “you can uniquely identify all floats by printing them with printf("%1.8e")” on the other hand relies on the compiler using round-to-nearest for conversions between binary and decimal, which the standard does not mandate and which, even when the compiler documents the choice, is sophisticated enough that the compiler/printf/strtod may get it wrong for difficult inputs: https://www.exploringbinary.com/tag/bug/ https://www.exploringbinary.com/tag/bug/