Question

Today I’ve a weird question.

The Code(C++)

#include <iostream>

union name
{
    int num;
    float num2;

}oblong;


int main(void)
{
    oblong.num2 = 27.881;

    std::cout << oblong.num << std::endl;

    return 0;
}

The Code(C)

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    float num = 27.881;

    printf("%d\n" , num);

    return 0;
}

The Question

1. As we know, C++ unions can hold more than one type of data element but only one type at a time. So basically the name oblong will only reserve one portion of memory which is 32-bit (because the biggest type in the union is 32-bit, int and float) and this portion could either hold a integer or float.

2. So I just assign a value of 27.881 into oblong.num2 (as you can see on the above code). But out of curiosity, I access the memory using oblong.num which is pointing to the same memory location.

3. As expected, it gave me a value which is not 27 because the way float and integer represented inside a memory is different, that’s why when I use oblong.num to access the memory portion it’ll treat that portion of memory value as integer and interpret it using integer representation way.

4. I know this phenomena also will happen in C , that’s why I initialize a float type variable with a value and later on read it using the %d.So I just try it out by using the same value 27.881 which you can see above. But when I run it, something weird happens, that is the value of the one I get in C is different from C++.

5. Why does this happen? From what I know the two values I get from the two codes in the end are not garbage values, but why do I get different values? I also use the sizeof to verified both C and C++ integer and float size and both are 32-bit. So memory size isn’t the one that causes this to happen, so what prompt this difference in values?

Answer 1

First of all, having the wrong printf() format string is undefined behavior. Now that said, here is what is actually happening in your case:

In vararg functions such as printf(), integers smaller than int are promoted to int and floats smaller than double are promoted to double.

The result is that your 27.881 is being converted to an 8-byte double as it is passed into printf(). Therefore, the binary representation is no longer the same as a float.

Format string %d expects a 4-byte integer. So in effect, you will be printing the lower 4-bytes of the double-precision representation of 27.881. (assuming little-endian)

*Actually (assuming strict-FP), you are seeing the bottom 4-bytes of 27.881 after it is cast to float, and then promoted to double.