Question

How do I know how a float is represented on a particular machine?

Answer 1

in C or C#, or any language perhaps ? (but particularly C)

Answer 2

I think there's a C macro somewhere in the float.h header

Answer 3

Pretty much all architectures today follow IEEE floating point standard (IEEE-745). You can read about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008