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What is the invertability of the IEEE 754 floating-point division? I mean is it guaranteed by the standard that if double y = 1.0 / x then x == 1.0 / y, i.e. x can be restored precisely bit by bit?
The cases when y is infinity or NaN are obvious exceptions.
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IEEE Standard 754 floating point is the most common representation today for real numbers on computers, including Intel-based PC's, Macs, and most Unix platforms. This is as simple as the name. 0 represents a positive number while 1 represents a negative number.
Because JavaScript uses the IEEE 754 standard for Math, it makes use of 64-bit floating numbers. This causes precision errors when doing floating point (decimal) calculations, in short, due to computers working in Base 2 while decimal is Base 10.
Yes, there are IEEE 754 double-precision(*) values x that are such x != 1.0 / (1.0 / x).
It is easy to build an example of a normal value with this property by hand: the one that's written 0x1.fffffffffffffp0 in C99's hexadecimal notation for floating-point values is such that 1.0 / (1.0 / 0x1.fffffffffffffp0) == 0x1.ffffffffffffep0. It was natural to expect 0x1.fffffffffffffp0 to be a counter-example because 1.0 / 0x1.fffffffffffffp0 falls at the beginning of a binade, where floating-point numbers are less dense, so a larger relative error had to happen on the innermost division. More precisely, 1.0 / 0x1.fffffffffffffp0 falls just above the midpoint between 0.5 and its double-precision successor, so that 1.0 / 0x1.fffffffffffffp0 is rounded up to the successor of 0.5, with a large relative error.
In decimal %.16e format, 0x1.fffffffffffffp0 is 1.9999999999999998e+00 and 0x1.ffffffffffffep0 is 1.9999999999999996e+00.
(*) there is no reason for the inverse function to have the property in the question for any of the IEEE 754 format
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