On Mar 23, 2011, at 1:25 PM, Igor Tandetnik wrote: > On 3/23/2011 12:58 PM, Eugene N wrote: >> I find the discussion very interesting. Apart from billing/accounting every >> good (scientific) application soones or later is bound to requare >> multiprecision library. > > Which scientific instrument can measure which physical quantity with an > accuracy greater than 15 significant digits? By way of example, Planck > constant is measured to about 8 significant digits. > > If you are using high precision to work with data measured with low > accuracy, you are just fooling yourself - those least significant digits > you labor so hard to preserve are completely bogus. > > Billing/accounting is best done in integers - say, in millionths of a > dollar.
Years ago it was done with BCD strings on IBM 14xx series. Current US national debt is 16 digits. Tom _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
