Didn't IBM mainframes use their own floating-point format? I seem to recall that their exponent was a couple of bits shorter so the mantissa could be a couple of bits longer, so their decimal exponents went from _80 to 79 or something like that.
On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 5:23 PM, James C Field <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Isn't this why IBM supported Binary Coded Decimal? Floating Point sux > for money. > > Floating point works fine for money unless you represent values as > fractions. > > In other words, scale things properly and you should be fine. > > Bad: 1.99 dollars > Good: 199 cents > > That said, if you are representing money values in cents, you can run > into problems if you deal with values exceeding 45 trillion dollars. > With inflation, this might become a real problem before too long. > > On the other hand, if inflation gets that bad, losing a few pennies here > and there should be a relatively minor worry. It's not as if they would > be worth much of anything under those circumstances. > > -- > Raul > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Devon McCormick, CFA ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
