Floating point numbers are useful for representing numbers that are
not integral. The precise range of floating point numbers is
machine-specific; it is the same as the range of the C data type
double on the machine you are using.
The read-syntax for floating point numbers requires either a decimal point (with at least one digit following), an exponent, or both. For example, ‘1500.0’, ‘15e2’, ‘15.0e2’, ‘1.5e3’, and ‘.15e4’ are five ways of writing a floating point number whose value is 1500. They are all equivalent. You can also use a minus sign to write negative floating point numbers, as in ‘-1.0’.
Most modern computers support the IEEE floating point standard,
which provides for positive infinity and negative infinity as floating point
values. It also provides for a class of values called NaN or
“not-a-number”; numerical functions return such values in cases where
there is no correct answer. For example, (/ 0.0 0.0) returns a
NaN. For practical purposes, there's no significant difference between
different NaN values in Emacs Lisp, and there's no rule for precisely
which NaN value should be used in a particular case, so Emacs Lisp
doesn't try to distinguish them (but it does report the sign, if you
print it). Here are the read syntaxes for these special floating
point values:
To test whether a floating point value is a NaN, compare it with
itself using =. That returns nil for a NaN, and
t for any other floating point value.
The value -0.0 is distinguishable from ordinary zero in
IEEE floating point, but Emacs Lisp equal and
= consider them equal values.
You can use logb to extract the binary exponent of a floating
point number (or estimate the logarithm of an integer):
This function returns the binary exponent of number. More precisely, the value is the logarithm of number base 2, rounded down to an integer.
(logb 10) ⇒ 3 (logb 10.0e20) ⇒ 69