c++ values acting odd.

[nightthepope]

I have this program and when it outputs its values to me using cout, sometimes I get some very odd numbers.

Such as for a double I would expect its value to be like "0" I get something like "2.640e-392". Or numbers of the like.

Or for other numbers like some of my ints, even those which werent assigned a value other than zero are having values of like -256.

What is going on?

I've traced my variables and nothing should lead to these sort of numbers.

[Jason]

having the code to look over might help us trace your problems... as for why its doing that, it has to be something your doing in the code.


Jason

[shmoove]

As far as the doubles are concerned, you have to keep in mind that the floating point format sacrifices precision in order to have a very broad range, so there are usually rounding errors in calculations. That why you shouldn't compare floating point values to 0, but instead you check that abs(myDouble) < EPSILON where EPSILON is an arbitrarily small value. "2.640e-392" is 2.64*10^(-392), a very very small number, and as far as floating point numbers are concerned that value should be treated as 0.

With the ints, if you assigned 0 then they should print 0, but if you didn't assign anything then they contain garbage, so you can't assume anything.

shmoove

[nightthepope]

Thanks for the clearup about doubles.
The problem with the random ints was I was just calling beyond the length of my array. Silly me.
Instead of an error it just gave me random numbers.