[This message was posted by Russell Curry of Assimilate Technology, Inc. <[email protected]> to the "FIXML" discussion forum at http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/7. You can reply to it on-line at http://fixprotocol.org/discuss/read/a293fa98 - PLEASE DO NOT REPLY BY MAIL.]
> Base float type? > > I suspect that a larger issue is being ignored here. > > Apparently it has been deliberately ignored for quite some period of > time, if there's a 2003 date on a prior mention. > > Use of floating point binary encoding where fixed point decimal value > encoding is intended is a raging disaster, for too many reasons to list > easily, but "skimming fractional rounding errors" should raise a red > flag, as should "no exact representation". > > Speaking from 4.5 years experience in an ANSI standards effort... > > Rather than trying to reinvent, badly, wheels already invented and > refined elsewhere, FIX should instead model its numeric entities on > tried and true ones, say, those from the COBOL community, which has > been doing number handling right for the business community for many > decades now. > > End of my comments. Hi Kent, I think that in the specifications the type definitions refer to the kind of data you can expect in a string representation of a value rather than as a data type you would use in a programming language. I do agree with you that using terms like "float" when you mean to say "decimal value" is a really bad idea... Cheers, Russ [You can unsubscribe from this discussion group by sending a message to mailto:[email protected]] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Financial Information eXchange" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fix-protocol?hl=en.
