Displaying IEEE-754 quadruple-precision (binary128) floating point values in scientific notation in C#

Question

I'm trying to translate the raw binary data from a thread context into a human-readable format, and have come up empty when trying to translate quadruple-precision floating point values into a readable format in C#.

Ultimately, I'd like to display it in standard scientific notation, e.g. 1.234567×10⁸⁹. I'm not worried about loss of precision in the process - I just want a reasonable idea of what the value is.

My first thought was to manually compute the value as a double by raising the exponent, but of course I'm going to exceed the maximum value in many cases. I don't mind losing precision, but not being able to display it at all isn't acceptable.

Is there some kind of simple mathematical hack I can use for this?

Answer 1

You could install a third-party library that handles that. For example it looks like QPFloat gives you a new struct called System.Quadruple which overrides ToString, so you could try that.

(I wonder when .NET will support something like System.Quadruple.)