Andrew Sullivan wrote:
On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 04:33:33PM -0400, Radhika Sambamurti wrote:
Andrew,
This has been quite helpful. My main concern is CPU cost. Thanks for the
input.
You're welcome. Are you sure your main concern should be CPU cost?
It's true that numeric is more costly that float in a lot of cases,
but I know at least one auditor who will refuse to certify results
from programs that anywhere use floating-point storage or calculation
on accounting data. The problem is really that you can get compound
errors -- very small rounding errors several times can turn out to be
a big problem. (One quick primer that can help you understand this
is at <http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/decifaq1.html>.)
Would you rather have wrong answers really, really fast, or right answers fast
enough?
--
Lew
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