Alan Falloon wrote:

> If we assume IEEE floating point format, then they can be compared as 
> integers. See the section "Comparing using integers" in

> http://www.cygnus-software.com/papers/comparingfloats/comparingfloats.htm

As the above link notes, since integers on most machines are 
twos-complement and not sign-magnitude, it doesn't work right for 
negative floats.

Working around this isn't possible without knowing it's actually a float 
(in which case a floating point compare could just be used, anyhow).