From: John Beckett 

"Geo"  wrote in message
news::
> It's also got some features I don't understand why they exist, for example
> when the heck would you use a float number instead of using double?

C++ uses the C philosophy that if the hardware can do it, then the language
should be able to call it. So, since most hardware can handle
single-precision and double-precision floating point numbers, the language
should handle both.

The somewhat bizarre promotion rules of C/C++ mean that doubles are
normally used to do non-integer calculations.

If you ever wanted to work with arrays of (say) 100 million floating point
numbers, you might be glad you can specify float (4 bytes in VC) rather
than double (8 bytes).

John

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