> There is a need for smallest Double.MIN_VALUE being positive because there
> is are gaps in the range of values that can be expressed by a Double.

Internal irrelevant stuff the user shouldn't be bothered with. It's
the same kind of implementation leak seen elsewhere in Java, i.e.
BigDecimal's broken equals method where 3.1 isn't equal to 3.10.

> It makes perfect sense to have Double.MIN_VALUE so one can determine the
> boundaries of what numbers can be represented by a Double at <a> and <b> in
> the above nasty range.

The C# implementations have no trouble offering just MaxValue,
MinValue, PositiveInfinity and NegativeInfinity. If you need arbitrary
base-10 precision, there are datatypes for that (BigDecimal and
decimal).

> Also calling the constant FRACTION or some derivative would be wrong as that
> is not the official term -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point.

Whether you want to refer to it as significand, mantissa, coefficient
or donut is irrelevant - I am sure you can see that "value" is
somewhat treturous. I.e. Double.valueOf(...) does NOT exclude the
exponent part.

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