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copied!<p>You probably knew this, but you <strong>can</strong> make literal floats/long doubles</p> <pre><code> float f = 4.0f; long double f = 4.0l; </code></pre> <p>Double is the default because thats what most people use. Long doubles may be overkill or and floats have very bad precision. Double works for almost every application.</p> <p>Why the naming? One day all we had was 32 bit floating point numbers (well really all we had was fixed point numbers, but I digress). Anyway, when floating point became a popular feature in modern architectures, C was probably the language dujour then, and the name "float" was given. Seemed to make sense. </p> <p>At the time, double may have been thought of, but not really implemented in the cpu's/fp cpus of the time, which were 16 or 32 bits. Once the double became used in more architectures, C probably got around to adding it. C needed something a name for something twice the size of a float, hence we got a double. Then someone needed even more precision, we thought he was crazy. We added it anyway. The name quadtuple(?) was overkill. Long double was good enough, and nobody made a lot of noise.</p> <p>Part of the confusion is that good-ole "int" seems to change with the time. It used to be that "int" meant 16 bit integer. Float, however, is bound to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754" rel="noreferrer">IEEE std</a> as the 32-bit IEEE floating point number. For that reason, C kept float defined as 32 bit and made double and long double to refer to the longer standards.</p>

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