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Comment by dark-star | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone who knows C better than me explain what the difference is between

    constexpr double mu = 3.986004418 * pow(10.0, 14.0);

which is used in the the explanatory blog post and presumably the code, and

    constexpr double mu = 3.986004418e14;

which is how I would have written it?

I would probably have used the first because it would not have occurred to me I could use the second.

FWIW the following prints 1, so it's probably a matter of taste:

    int main() {
        printf("%d\n", 3.986004418e14 == 3.986004418 * pow(10.0, 14.0));
    }

I prefer the second one for sure.

Shouldn't you use %f for a float?

It's printing the result of the comparison (1 or 0), not the original values.

Oh right the result of the comparison. Thanks.