> On Jan 9, 2019, at 6:26 AM, Michael or Penny Novack 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On 1/8/2019 11:50 PM, John Ralls wrote:
>> The answer is probably in app-utils/calculation. All of that was probably 
>> written before Guile grew a rational number class and I think that 
>> GncNumerics get converted to doubles before being passed to the interest 
>> functions. That would pretty much guarantee rounding issues.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
> I will repeat, this sort of "rounding error" is not a bug.
> 
> If two persons set out to perform a calculation which can be done by a number 
> of methods with rounding involved at numerous places and no agreement as to 
> either the method to be used or the precision maintained at each step THERE 
> IS NO REASONABLE EXPECTATION THAT THEIR ANSWERS WILL MATCH EXACTLY.
> 
> Treated as a "bug", it might* be possible to change the code so as to match 
> the answers of a particular lending institution, but then could be wrong for 
> another lending institution that used different methods or rounding than the 
> first.
> 
> Michael D Novack    << who in my working days often had to compute the "fuzz" 
> for comparisons >>
> 
> * Might, because you have no reason to suppose that a lending institution 
> necessarily used the same methods/rounding for car loans as for house 
> mortgages.

Which is why GnuCash mostly uses rational numbers and no rounding for internal 
calculations. Using binary floating-point in financial software is a bug on its 
own, so that “mostly” is a bug. It needs to be “only”.

This isn’t about matching the results with someone else’s computer, this is 
about internal consistency in GnuCash.

Regards,
John Ralls


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