8 ms·

So overflow means overflow, but underflow as well, while underflow means precision loss. What a bad case of misnomers.

• bregma 6y ago
  To be fair it's not just underflow, but equality that differs between numeric types. The equality of signed and unsigned integers might not mean what you think it means, but it's exact. The equality of real-valued types always means what you think it means, but it's inexact so you need to write it as "close enough to" instead of "equals". With integers, "overflow" means "wrap around because the internal representation is really on a modulo field" whereas with floating point "overflow" means "the result is NAN or INF" and undeflow means "the result is NAN or zero or DENORM" but it's awkward to use such phrases in everyday conversation. Especially to your boss, whose eyes glaze over when you start using such words and he'll just interrupt with a "when will the JIRA be done? I have another meeting in five." The rule of thumb is that you have to know what you're doing to use lower-level languages like C++. That already eliminates 80% of the programmers out there but thank goodness there are high-level languages that reduce to simplistic concepts and let software be churned out at a rapid pace.
• tom_mellior 6y ago
  Overflow doesn't mean underflow. Overflow means overflow. You can use "negative overflow" for the special case of overflow where a negative number's magnitude is too big. Though why would you care about the difference between positive and negative overflow, really?