nando ha scritto: > My contribution to this conversation is.. > Always INT or LONG for money. > Keep a global variable to divide by (for example 2 decimal places) 100 > when printing/displaying things to humans... > -OR- to take the string and insert a period for cents (North America) > Make a really nice SUB to return a formatted string is good. > It is the utmost importance not to use FLOAT from the beginning > because calculations will be wrong after a while and it will not balance. > You will have headaches!!! > You are perfectly true. It seems that floating point does not like base 10 numbers... :-)
But here comes in place the power of a programming language; a good language is a wrapper around bad or annoying things. All we love gambas because it is easy to construct user interface. But there would be no necessity of its power - one can write external functions and interface to X11 directly... So when you tell me "don't use floats for accounting" I agree. When you say "use a global variable to divide", "insert a decimal point" and so on, I think "100% of gambas users want to use graphical interfaces, while only 2% of them want to use financial capabilities. So, that 2% must live with a language not very suitable for accounting". "Use long integers, divide them, use format$()..." is the reply from Benoit. Does someone remember the Cobol? With a simple declaration "picture 99.9999" it created a datatype and managed all the roundings and conversions on that datatype; this was the power of that language. I don't say that gambas should implement this, but it would not hurt... it is a matter of choice; I understand that this kind of things is difficult to implement (or, who knows... with OO programming... but the really hard part is the mixing of different types in the same expression). The most important application I've written with gambas is something similar to a financial one. I faced problems with gridviews, tableviews, formats, roundings... all the things we are speaking about just now, and they are not yet fully solved. I think that the way you describe is a hard work, even if it is the only possible at the moment. Regards, -- Doriano Blengino "Listen twice before you speak. This is why we have two ears, but only one mouth." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Return on Information: Google Enterprise Search pays you back Get the facts. http://p.sf.net/sfu/google-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Gambas-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gambas-user
