Scientific Type ("M" Reference)

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The Scientific type encompasses all floating-point or exact numbers.

Operators

The unary operations in the following table take Scientific as a right operand.

Operator Return

+, -

Scientific

The binary operations in the following table take Scientific as a left operand.

Operator Right Operand Return

+, -

Scientific

Scientific

*, /, %

Scientific

Scientific

>, <, <=, >=, ==, !=

Scientific

Logical

The arithmetic operations (+, -, *, /, %) are specialized to return the most specific type of its operands. For example, Single + Single returns Single, while Single + Double returns Double).

Remarks

The following operations may cause underflow and overflow errors:

  • The predefined unary - operator.

  • The predefined +, -, *, and / binary operators.

  • Explicit numeric conversions from one Number type to another.

If all of the operands are constant expressions, underflow and overflow is a compile error; otherwise, underflow and overflow is a run-time error.

The following operations may cause a divide by zero error:

  • The predefined / and % binary operators.

If the second operand (the denominator) is a constant expression, divide by zero is a compile error; otherwise, divide by zero is a run-time error.

Scientific is an abstract type with the following two concrete subtypes:

  • Single

  • Double

Code Example

The following code shows the Kilometers field being declared as a Scientific type and receiving the value of 15e2 (or 150).

Kilometers : Scientific = 15e2;