"Beman Dawes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > At 05:13 PM 7/20/2003, Misha Bergal wrote: > > >Something seems to be wrong to me tough. The programming languages > >(environments) introduced lately do not implement fixed-point only > decimal > >numbers. > > Fixed-point is used in applications driven by external requirements, not by > what is or isn't available in programming languages.
I don't think people who did Java or C# are ignorant of requirements of financial applications. They must have had the reasons for doing floating point instead of fixed point only. > That's possible, but my guess is that it is going to be a long time before > floating-point becomes acceptable in the broad world of business, industry, > and government. Do you mean that it is unacceptable because of the difference between 1) and 2): 1) Fixed point (2 digits after decimal point) : 1.00 + 1.00 * 0.06 * 300.00 = 1.00 2) One of the implementations using floating point: 1.00 + 1.00 * 0.06 * 300.00 = 19.000000 Well, at least 2) explicitly shows that the necessary rounding did not occur, in case of 1) it is not so explicit, so I would not be sure that 1.00 is the intended result. > Try it on your tax return and see what kind of a response > you get:-? When calculating my tax return I use the same arithmetic my calculator uses. I believe it uses floating point. > Uh... In the applications I have in mind it is floating-point arithmetic > that has a bad reputation for producing technically correct answers that > are dead-wrong in terms of the application's needs. Do you have any references regarding bad reputation of floating point arithmetic that I can look up? Misha Bergal MetaCommunications Engineering _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
