To the exact cent? I guess you have not heard the news that the Euro dollar
is causing. The calculations must be correct to the 10th of a mil for the
conversion factors. Thus one needs E,EEE,EEE,EEE,EEE.ccccc (yes, 5 decimals
to round up.) It is known in Europe as maybe worse than the Y2K issue. In
Italy, they don't have decimals at all for the Lira so adding any decimals
at all is a headache.
P.S. All these side notes being passed around are very interesting, even if
off the topic somewhat.
At 01:48 PM 10/28/98 -0800, you wrote:
>With regard to the need for 128-bit cpus:
>
>Another area that will inevitably demand such data types is the financial
>industry. If you use packed BCD (very popular with the "exact"
>calculations that CPAs demand) and you want to represent anything under
>$100 trillion to the exact cent, you already need 64 bits for the
>significant digits, which means the sign nibble pushes you over the
>64-bit limit. Budgets (especially national ones) are only going to get
>bigger and things like the Euro and conversions between currencies will
>make it necessary for the international financial types to go to such
>data sizes.
>
>Truett Lee Smith
>San Francisco, CA
>E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
