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Asked: 2026-05-10T17:06:22+00:00

I’m failing to understand exactly what the IF statement is doing, from what I

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I’m failing to understand exactly what the IF statement is doing, from what I can see it is checking if the variable x is equal to the int 0. If this is true the ABSOLUTE value of the variable y is returned… this is when I lose the plot, why would the return statement then go on to include <= ESPILON? Surely this means less than or equal to the value of epsilon? if so how is that working? If it doesn’t mean that then what does it mean?

(JAVA CODE)

final double EPSILON = 1E-14; if (x == 0)     return Math.abs(y) <= EPSILON;
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1 Answer

  1. Floating-point math is by its nature inaccurate, so rather than testing for equivalence (which is always a bad idea), instead the developer has chosen a small number (1×10^-14 in this case) as the acceptable tolerance for proximity to zero. The return statement returns a comparison, so what this will do is take the absolute value of y, and return true if and only if it is sufficiently close to zero, where sufficiently close is defined by EPSILON.

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