On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 02:07:31PM +1000, bob parker wrote: > On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 13:20, John Summerfield wrote: > > > As for the money, I learned to write financial applications in COBOL. > > Whoops, it's extremely rusty. > > mony PIC S9(11v3) COMP-3. > > and in PL/1 > > money fixed dec(11,3). > > COBOL, such a beutiful language! If a total overflows the destination field > it just chops off the most significant digit. Perfect for Enron and naturally > the Pentagon for whom it was originally designed.
Accounting will get a lot easier when native 64-bit ints are more widespread. Then you can just keep six significant digits (up to ten thousandth of penny) and do all calcuations as integers scaled by 100,000. I got hit with this when I was doing a job for a major Dutch insurance company and had to validate several hundred thousand transactions totalling 500 billion guilders and make sure all the accounts matched to the "penny." I couldn't use fake numbers -- too slow. I did it all in double precision scaled to 12 places or so and made sure it matched to "machine precision." Bit harder than dealing with less than $4 billion worth of stuff, which fits in 32 bits. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
