Is it possible to get 0 by subtracting two unequal floating point numbers?

Question

Is it possible to get division by 0 (or infinity) in the following example?

public double calculation(double a, double          


        

Answer 1

The supplied function can indeed return infinity:

public class Test {
    public static double calculation(double a, double b)
    {
         if (a == b)
         {
             return 0;
         }
         else
         {
             return 2 / (a - b);
         }
    }    

    /**
     * @param args
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        double d1 = Double.MIN_VALUE;
        double d2 = 2.0 * Double.MIN_VALUE;
        System.out.println("Result: " + calculation(d1, d2)); 
    }
}

The output is Result: -Infinity.

When the result of the division is to big to be stored in a double, infinity is returned even if the denominator is non-zero.