Strange behaviour of the pow function

Question

While running the following lines of code:

int i,a;    

for(i=0;i<=4;i++)  
{    
    a=pow(10,i);    
    printf(\"%d\\t\",a);    
}   

Answer 1

No one spelt out how to actually do it correctly - instead of pow function, just have a variable that tracks the current power:

int i, a, power;    

for (i = 0, a = 1; i <= 4; i++, a *= 10) {    
    printf("%d\t",a);    
}

This continuing multiplication by ten is guaranteed to give you the correct answer, and quite OK (and much better than pow, even if it were giving the correct results) for tasks like converting decimal strings into integers.