SEI CERT C Coding Standard

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changes.mady.by.user Carol J. Lallier

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Be careful when rearranging floating-point expressions to ensure the greatest accuracy of the result.

Section Subclause 5.1.2.3, paragraph 14, of the C Standard [ISO/IEC 9899:2011], states:

Rearrangement for floating-point expressions is often restricted because of limitations in precision as well as range. The implementation cannot generally apply the mathematical associative rules for addition or multiplication, nor the distributive rule, because of roundoff error, even in the absence of overflow and underflow. Likewise, implementations cannot generally replace decimal constants to rearrange expressions. In the following fragment, rearrangements suggested by mathematical rules for real numbers are often not valid.

Code Block
double x, y, z;
/* ... */
x = (x * y) * z; /* not equivalent to x *= y * z; */
z = (x - y) + y ; /* not equivalent to z = x; */
z = x + x * y; /* not equivalent to z = x * (1.0 + y); */
y = x / 5.0; /* not equivalent to y = x * 0.2; */

...

Recommendation

Severity

Likelihood

Remediation Cost

Priority

Level

FLP01-C

lowLow

probableProbable

highHigh

P2

L3

Related Vulnerabilities

Search for vulnerabilities resulting from the violation of this recommendation on the CERT website.

Related Guidelines

SEI CERT C++ Secure Coding StandardFLP01-CPP. Take care in rearranging floating-point expressions
ISO/IEC TR 24772:2013Floating-point Arithmetic [PLF]

Bibliography

[ISO/IEC 9899:2011]Section Subclause 5.1.2.3, "Program Execution"

 

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