title: Using long doubles on windows
body: <p>I have an application where I absolutely must use <code>long double</code> data type due to catastrophic truncation error when doing math with double precision.  My testing procedures are going crazy because on windows long double with Visual Studio is just an alias to double, while on linux and OSX, long double is a real long double with nominally precision of 1e-19. </p>
  
  <p>On mingw (windows port of GCC) is where I am confused.  Mingw claims that LDBL_EPSILON has a precision of 1e-19, but googleing suggests that the mingw uses the c runtime that is actually just the microsoft c runtime which doesn't support real long doubles.  Can anyone shed any light here?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>:  The crux of the problem is this: on mingw, if I call the math function <code>log(long double x)</code>, is this just an alias to <code>log(double x)</code>?  In either case, how could I write my own script to test this behavior and/or test for it?</p>