Following up on my own last message, here is a link to a paper titled "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic." It's something someone on the JUG list pointed out to me a while back. It's very deep, possibly more so than needed by the average programmer. But at least it serves as a good reference on the subject, and contains info on the IEEE standard I was referring to before.
If nothing else, it would probably be important to know whether your chosen environment (langauge / hardware ) conforms to that spec or not... if it does, then at least you'll know you have a certain level of guaranteed behavior you can depend on.
And again, some languages may take care of this for you by providing a special datatype for currency. Which of course leads back to the original question of which type of field to store those values in. Dang, guess I haven't been much help at all. :-)
http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html
TTYL,
Phil -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
