On Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:11:24 +0200 Michael Sperber <sper...@deinprogramm.de> wrote:
> I'll point out that floating-point vs. BCD or something like it is SO > not an issue with the real-world financial calculations the SEC is > worried about. (Well, it is an issue for the calculations, but it is > not an issue for the people doing them.) Most everyone in that > community has long accepted binary floating-point as completely adequate > for doing financial calculations for complex products. That would be why Python and Java (at least) now have decimal floating point data types, and why the new IBM P7 processors have decimal floating point in hardware, and why the IEEE have ratified decimal floating point extensions to IEEE-754. (Check out the Wikipedia entry for IEEE 754-2008 for a quick overview.) I'm in the camp that thinks that this is all stupid, but clearly I don't have enough to do with the folks who think that it's worth bothering with (or vital). It's certainly a lot of extra hair for the folks who's languages just have a class of "inexact" arithmetic, I imagine. Cheers, -- Andrew _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
