Legacy Document

*

You can use the * symbol to multiply two real numbers.

x * y

x

Any floating-point number.

y

Any floating-point number.

DESCRIPTION

The * operator performs the standard multiplication of two floating-point numbers $(x\times y)$ .

EXCEPTIONS

When x and y are both finite and nonzero, either the result of x * y is exact or it raises one of the following exceptions:

• inexact (if the result of x * y must be rounded or if an overflow or underflow occurs)
• overflow (if the result is outside the range of the data type)
• underflow (if the result is inexact and must be represented as a denormalized number or 0)

SPECIAL CASES

Table 6-5 shows the results when one of the operands of the multiplication operation is a zero, a NaN, or an Infinity. In this table, x is a nonzero floating-point number.

Table 6-5 Special cases for floating-point multiplication

Operation	Result	Exceptions raised
x * +0	\xB10	None
x * $-0$	\xB10	None
\xB1 * \xB10	NaN	Invalid
x * NaN	NaN	None[7]
x * +	\xB1	None
x * $-$	\xB1	None
\xB10 * \xB1	NaN	Invalid

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[7] If the NaN is a signaling NaN, the invalid exception is raised.