Floating-point zero in Julia

Julia | Floating-point zero: In this tutorial, we are going to learn about the Floating-point zeros with their binary representations in Julia programming language.
Submitted by IncludeHelp, on March 28, 2020

In Julia, floating-point numbers have two zeros,

Positive zero (+0.0)
Negative zero (-0.0)

Both are the same. If we compare them by using the Equal to (==) operator, it returns true. Consider the below example,

Example:

# comparing the values

println("0.0 == -0.0: ", 0.0 == -0.0)

# comparing the variables containing zeros
x = 0.0
y = -0.0
println("x == y: ", x == y)

Output

0.0 == -0.0: true
x == y: true

But they don't have the same binary representations.

To check the binary representation of the zeros or any other numbers we can use the bitstring() function.

Example:

# printing the binary

println("bitstring(0.0): ", bitstring(0.0))
println("bitstring(-0.0): ", bitstring(-0.0))

Output

bitstring(0.0): 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
bitstring(-0.0): 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

See the above examples, negative and positive zeros are the same but their binary representations of them are not the same.