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A comment on U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians. Parent comment

Re:U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians by scatters on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @04:11AM (#12588094)
sizeof(double) is not specific to any one programming language or architecture; it's determined by IEEE 754, an international, cross-language, cross-platform standard. Non-IEEE floating-point implementations are exceedingly rare nowadays (although they do exist).

You're right about it being engineering, not computer science, but IMO it's reasonable to expect someone applying to a programming job (assuming this is what it was) to have at least some software engineering experience.

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Re:U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians by kirab on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @04:18AM (#12588113)
Well..

  C and C++ offer a wide variety of arithmetic types.
  Double precision is not required by the standards
  (except by the optional annex F of C99, covering
  IEEE 754 arithmetic), but on most systems, the
  double type corresponds to double precision.
  However, on 32-bit x86 with extended precision
  by default, some compilers may not conform to
  the C standard and/or the arithmetic may suffer
  from double-rounding issues.
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Re:U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians by daemin on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @05:18AM (#12588282)
So a reasonable answer could say - usually 8 bytes - but sometimes with extended precision it could be 10 bytes, etc...

I am actually kind of sick of the people that say these details are not important to being a good programmer. They absolutely are, knowing fundamentals of the machine, language, and environment that you are developing in is essential.

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Re:U.S. regulators accuse Palantir of bias against Asians by scatters on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @04:43AM (#12588179)
ap22213 (OP for this thread) was more precise than I was; they actually wrote "a double precision floating point variable" rather than writing "double", which could either be a shorthand for "double precision floating point" or be referring to a platform/language type (where that exists by that name).
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