Ashley - what's you're recommendation re using BigDecimal (which does work as you point out) and the Money gem (which it sounds like makes a dev's life a bit easier)??? Is it worth trying to port an application from use of BigDecimal to Money gem???
On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 10:27 PM, Ashley Moran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Nov 08, 2008, at 2:18 am, Zach Dennis wrote: > >> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> >>> yep - this was recommended on forums over float - why? >> >> You are in for a lot of headaches in you application resorting to >> decimal fields in the database, since it restores them as BigDecimals. >> It sucks to deal with BigDecimals in your app. I very highly recommend >> the Money library. I recommend installing it as a plugin and using the >> CollectiveIdea fork. > > > Ha, I wrote the ActiveRecord patch so this was possible :) > > The reason for storing monetary values as SQL decimals is that they aren't > subject to rounding errors[1]. I used to work in the finance sector, and it > was absolutely unacceptable to expose financial calculations to these > errors. Hence I added support in ActiveRecord so we could use Rails; it was > just not an option otherwise. > > The decision you have to make is between the extra effort now of using > decimals in your code vs the extra effort later of explaining to your users > why your calculations sometimes come out wrong. And that depends on how > much your users value knowing that these figures are correct. > > Ashley > > > [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/12/floating_point_approximation/ > > -- > http://www.patchspace.co.uk/ > http://aviewfromafar.net/ > > _______________________________________________ > rspec-users mailing list > rspec-users@rubyforge.org > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users > _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
