"Andrei Alexandrescu" <seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote in message news:ijuub9$tv5$1...@digitalmars.com... > On 2/21/11 4:48 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote: >> On Monday 21 February 2011 01:55:28 Walter Bright wrote: >>> Kevin Bealer wrote: >>>> 1. To solve the basic problem the original poster was asking -- if you >>>> are working with simple decimals and arithmetic you can get completely >>>> accurate representations this way. For some cases like simple >>>> financial >>>> work this might work really well. e.g. where float would not be because >>>> of the slow leak of information with each operation. (I assume real >>>> professional financial work is already done using a (better) >>>> representation.) >>> >>> A reasonable way to do financial work is to use longs to represent >>> pennies. >>> After all, you don't have fractional cents in your accounts. >>> >>> Using floating point to represent money is a disaster in the making. >> >> Actually, depending on what you're doing, I'm not sure that you can >> legally >> represent money with floating point values. As I understand it, there are >> definite >> restrictions on banking software and the like with regards to that sort >> of thing >> (though I don't know exactly what they are). > > This is a long-standing myth. I worked on Wall Street and have friends who > have been doing it for years. Everybody uses double. > > Andrei >
Now we know who to blame for the downfall of the financial sector :-) -=mike=-
