Why is the “f” required when declaring floats?

Question

Example:

float timeRemaining = 0.58f;

Why is the f is required at the end of this number?

Answer 1

Your declaration of a float contains two parts:

1. It declares that the variable timeRemaining is of type float.
2. It assigns the value 0.58 to this variable.

The problem occurs in part 2.

The right-hand side is evaluated on its own. According to the C# specification, a number containing a decimal point that doesn't have a suffix is interpreted as a double.

So we now have a double value that we want to assign to a variable of type float. In order to do this, there must be an implicit conversion from double to float. There is no such conversion, because you may (and in this case do) lose information in the conversion.

The reason is that the value used by the compiler isn't really 0.58, but the floating-point value closest to 0.58, which is 0.57999999999999978655962351581366... for double and exactly 0.579999946057796478271484375 for float.

Strictly speaking, the f is not required. You can avoid having to use the f suffix by casting the value to a float:

float timeRemaining = (float)0.58;