title: How are floating point literals in C interpreted?
body: <p>In a C program, when you write a floating point literal like 3.14159 is there standard interpretation or is it compiler or architecture dependent?  Java is <a href="http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/Double.html#valueOf(java.lang.String)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">exceedingly clear</a> about how floating point strings are interpreted, but when I read K&amp;R or other C documentation the issue seems swept under the rug.</p>