Finding square root without using sqrt function?

There is a better algorithm, which needs at most 6 iterations to converge to maximum precision for double numbers:

#include <math.h>

double sqrt(double x) {
    if (x <= 0)
        return 0;       // if negative number throw an exception?
    int exp = 0;
    x = frexp(x, &exp); // extract binary exponent from x
    if (exp & 1) {      // we want exponent to be even
        exp--;
        x *= 2;
    }
    double y = (1+x)/2; // first approximation
    double z = 0;
    while (y != z) {    // yes, we CAN compare doubles here!
        z = y;
        y = (y + x/y) / 2;
    }
    return ldexp(y, exp/2); // multiply answer by 2^(exp/2)
}

Algorithm starts with 1 as first approximation for square root value. Then, on each step, it improves next approximation by taking average between current value y and x/y. If y = sqrt(x), it will be the same. If y > sqrt(x), then x/y < sqrt(x) by about the same amount. In other words, it will converge very fast.

UPDATE: To speed up convergence on very large or very small numbers, changed sqrt() function to extract binary exponent and compute square root from number in [1, 4) range. It now needs frexp() from <math.h> to get binary exponent, but it is possible to get this exponent by extracting bits from IEEE-754 number format without using frexp().