S
Screamin Lord Byron
I used use to teach FORTRAN at UBC way back when. We covered this in
the first semester. This very basic stuff about floating point. If
you taught yourself you may have missed this. See
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/floatingpoint.html
to fill in your missing background.
Why not simply read Wiki's article about IEEE 754. If floating point
calculations must be precise and predictable across platforms, one must
ensure to use IEEE 754 (ie. strictfp keyword), and not the default,
machine-dependent fp representation.