Alan Green wrote: > On 12/1/06, James Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Now, does anybody want to talk about Django? > > Yes! > > Is anyone writing financial or money-handling applications in Django? > Any particular issues or "gotchas" the world should know about?
Sort of. I work at a hedge fund and am writing all of our internal applications in Django/Python. I think the statement that if you are dealing with money at all that you *must* use decimal is bit of an over-generalization. All our applications are working with financial data, but none of them require decimal accuracy. Here are a few examples: - risk analysis: we take our positions, lookup some related data from internal and external systems, and run them through various financial models which output sensitivities to various market indices. There is so much estimation, guesswork and uncertainty in risk analysis that arguing for decimal precision is silly. We use float for speed and because its more accurate than the analysis itself. - reconciliation: comparing trades, positions and P&L from various systems and vendors and reporting discrepencies. We compare quantities exactly (which are typically whole numbers) and money values within some tolerance. Again, floating point is more than accurate enough for the job. - reporting: aggregating *lots* of data and producing "drill down" reports for analysis of our performance. The keep the reports clean and easy to read, most people want the numbers rounded to the nearest thousand or even to the nearest million. No problem with floating point here. The big advantages for using floating point are speed and compatibility (no need to manually convert to/from float to pass to other routines and systems). I can understand supporting float AND Decimal, or just float, but supporting ONLY Decimal is limiting. -Dave --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
