Question

Why doesn’t C++ have <cstdfloat> header for floats like it has <cstdint> for integers?

EDIT :

By <cstdfloat> I mean header that provides typedefs for float and double. Much like qreal typedef in Qt. Hope my question is clear now.

Answer 1

Often an application needs exactly 16 bits for an integer for, say, a bitfield, but having exactly 16 bits for a float is kind of useless. Manipulating bits in an integer is easy, so having exactly 16 is nice. Manipulating bits in a float requires casting it to an integer, making a float16 type rather extraneous.

By the same token, having an integral type capable of storing (and also performing math on) pointers is useful, but who ever needs to convert a pointer value to a floating point value, then perform floating point math on it, then convert it back to a pointer?

The point is that most of the functionality in stdint.h (or cstdint for C++, except that stdint.h is a C99 header and isn’t technically part of C++) doesn’t apply to floating point values.