You should rarely, if ever, compare floating point numbers for equality. The format is prone to numerical error. The range you used is one proper solution; otherwise, use something like this:

if(abs(number -4.0) < 0.00001)

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

Your problem lies within float itself.

A float is usually 32 bits large. So is an int on 32 bit processors. With 32 bits you can represent 2^32 different states. Each of those states is uniquely mapped to one numerical value with ints. So an int can represent 4294967296 numbers (be it all positive or half negative and half positive). A float, however, can represent a much greater amount of numbers simply because it stores information on digits on both sides of the decimal dot. That means the data has to be organized in a different manner. It''s sorta compressed. This compression, however, causes it to lose accuracy. That''s the reason why you _have to_ check floating-point data types against some tolerance, unless you write a wrapper that automates this, of course (no big deal).
Thus, it''s very possible to assign 2.0f to a float and have a conditional check immediately afterwards return that it''s not 2.0f.

As a side note, floating-point data types lose accuracy greatly when you have large values on the left side of the decimal dot. So, if you need great precision you must keep the absolute value as small as possible.

here''s a fun little piece of code that sort of illustrates the inaccuracies of floating point notation:

#include<stdio.h>main(){     for( float x = 33554430; x <= 33554440; x++ )        printf("%f\n", x);    return 0;}