sqrt, perfect squares and floating point errors

Question

In the sqrt function of most languages (though here I\'m mostly interested in C and Haskell), are there any guarantees that the square root of a perfect square

Answer 1

@tmyklebu perfectly answered the question. As a complement, let's see a possibly less efficient alternative for testing perfect square of fractions without asm directive.

Let's suppose we have an IEEE 754 compliant sqrt which rounds the result correctly.
Let's suppose exceptional values (Inf/Nan) and zeros (+/-) are already handled.
Let's decompose sqrt(x) into I*2^m where I is an odd integer.
And where I spans n bits: 1+2^(n-1) <= I < 2^n.

If n > 1+floor(p/2) where p is floating point precision (e.g. p=53 and n>27 in double precision)
Then 2^(2n-2) < I^2 < 2^2n.
As I is odd, I^2 is odd too and thus spans over > p bits.
Thus I is not the exact square root of any representable floating point with this precision.

But given I^2<2^p, could we say that x was a perfect square?
The answer is obviously no. A taylor expansion would give

sqrt(I^2+e)=I*(1+e/2I - e^2/4I^2 + O(e^3/I^3))

Thus, for e=ulp(I^2) up to sqrt(ulp(I^2)) the square root is correctly rounded to rsqrt(I^2+e)=I... (round to nearest even or truncate or floor mode).

Thus we would have to assert that sqrt(x)*sqrt(x) == x.
But above test is not sufficient, for example, assuming IEEE 754 double precision, sqrt(1.0e200)*sqrt(1.0e200)=1.0e200, where 1.0e200 is exactly 99999999999999996973312221251036165947450327545502362648241750950346848435554075534196338404706251868027512415973882408182135734368278484639385041047239877871023591066789981811181813306167128854888448 whose first prime factor is 2^613, hardly a perfect square of any fraction...

So we can combine both tests:

#include 
bool is_perfect_square(double x) {
    return sqrt(x)*sqrt(x) == x
        && squared_significand_fits_in_precision(sqrt(x));
}
bool squared_significand_fits_in_precision(double x) {
    double scaled=scalb( x , DBL_MANT_DIG/2-ilogb(x));
    return scaled == floor(scaled)
        && (scalb(scaled,-1)==floor(scalb(scaled,-1)) /* scaled is even */
            || scaled < scalb( sqrt((double) FLT_RADIX) , DBL_MANT_DIG/2 + 1));
}

EDIT: If we want to restrict to the case of integers, we can also check that floor(sqrt(x))==sqrt(x) or use dirty bit hacks in squared_significand_fits_in_precision...