On 11/02/16 09:37 AM, Virgil Arrington wrote:
Thanks for the tip, but back in 1989 when this was all happening, I'm
not sure that my DOS spreadsheet even had the ability to display
numbers as "currency". I certainly made no attempt to do so, even if
it were possible. They were just numbers and, yes, integers, and no,
the spreadsheet didn't get 28 divided by 7 correct.
I have learned, however, as you point out, that how numbers are
displayed is not the same as what they are. For example, you can't
"round" a number in a spreadsheet by simply reducing the number of
decimal places displayed in a cell. The underlying number remains
unrounded and further calculations with it might produce undesired
results. When working with currency, I've developed the habit of
probably overusing the the "@round" function at each step of a complex
calculation just to ensure desired results.
Virgil
There were stories back in the 1970s about programmers taking advantage
of the binary/floating point rounding errors to transfer a penny here
and there into their own accounts. With huge numbers of transactions
each day, the pennies added up very quickly.
COBOL actually had features that let you do arithmetic in decimal digits
with the decimal point being a display item, not an actual fractional
part of a number, so that the results would be exactly what they were if
you did the calculations by hand.
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