Be careful when rearranging floating-point expressions to ensure the greatest accuracy of the result.
Subclause According to C99, Section 5.1.2.3, "Program execution"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; */
Risk Assessment
Failing Failure to understand the limitations in precision of floating-point-represented numbers and the their implications of this on the arrangement of expressions can cause unexpected arithmetic results.
Recommendation | Severity | Likelihood | Remediation Cost | Priority | Level | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
FLP01-A | 1 (low) | 2 (probable) | 2 (medium) | C | Low | Probable | High | P2 P4 | L3 |
Related Vulnerabilities
Search for vulnerabilities resulting from the violation of this rule recommendation on the CERT website.
Related Guidelines
| SEI CERT C++ Coding Standard | FLP01-CPP. Take care in rearranging floating-point expressions |
| ISO/IEC TR 24772:2013 | Floating-point Arithmetic [PLF] |
Bibliography
| [ISO/IEC 9899:2011] | Subclause 5.1.2.3, "Program Execution" |
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