In the hope of shedding some light on this problem, I did a bit of
research on actual practice, covering several widely-used major
systems. Here's what I found out:
IBM big iron--s/360/370/380/390, AS/400, COBOL, PL/I, DB2. Fixed-point
decimal with a max. of 31 digits. The decimal point may be to
the right or left of the significant digits.
Java The java.math.BigDecimal class; infinite precision fixed-point
decimal. One needs to specify the type of rounding for each
division; I assume that the intention is that BigDecimal would
be subclassed. IBM offers an alternative--
com.ibm.math.BigDecimal--which provides decimal floating point
as in REXX.
mSQL Floating point, radix and precision unknown.
MySQL
Fixed-point decimal, precision unknown.
Oracle
Fixed-point decimal, precision unknown.
REXX (IBM interpreter, similar in function to Perl or Python.)
Settable-precision floating-point decimal. Comparisons are
blurred by a "fuzz."
I think all the big banks use the big IBM servers; it seems to me that
gnucash could profit by building on the datatypes that they use.
R.
IBM big iron
<http://www-4.ibm.com/cgi-bin/db2www/data/db2/udb/winos2unix/support/document.d2w/report?fn=db2v7s0varstrt.htm#Header_124>
Java <http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/math/BigDecimal.html>
mSQL <http://www.hughes.com.au/library/msql/manual_20/api.html>
MySQL
<http://www.mysql.com/documentation/mysql/bychapter/manual_Reference.html#Numeric_types>
Oracle <http://www.uwp.edu/academic/mis/baldwin/oraddl.htm>
REXX <ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/ps/products/ad/obj-xx/rexxref.pdf>
--
Randolph Fritz
Eugene, Oregon, USA
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