GNU Scientific Library – Reference Manual: Long double

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### 2.6 Long double

In general, the algorithms in the library are written for double precision only. The `long double` type is not supported for actual computation.

One reason for this choice is that the precision of `long double` is platform dependent. The IEEE standard only specifies the minimum precision of extended precision numbers, while the precision of `double` is the same on all platforms.

However, it is sometimes necessary to interact with external data in long-double format, so the vector and matrix datatypes include long-double versions.

It should be noted that in some system libraries the `stdio.h` formatted input/output functions `printf` and `scanf` are not implemented correctly for `long double`. Undefined or incorrect results are avoided by testing these functions during the `configure` stage of library compilation and eliminating certain GSL functions which depend on them if necessary. The corresponding line in the `configure` output looks like this,

    checking whether printf works with long double... no

Consequently when `long double` formatted input/output does not work on a given system it should be impossible to link a program which uses GSL functions dependent on this.

If it is necessary to work on a system which does not support formatted `long double` input/output then the options are to use binary formats or to convert `long double` results into `double` for reading and writing.