On Sep 1, 4:51 am, Dennis Lee Bieber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:06:49 -0400, Steve Holden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > declaimed the following in comp.lang.python: > > > That last sentence is patent nonsense, and completely untrue. Many > > satisfactory financial applications have been written using only > > floating-point arithmetic. Indeed I believe the accountant's Swiss army > > knife, the Excel spreadsheet, uses floating-point numbers exclusively. > > Excel supports M$'s "Currency" data type
That sentence is also completely untrue. Excel supports only IEEE 754 64-bit floating point, and that is how bean-counts, temperature readings, dates, and money amounts are stored in an XLS file. What is confusing you may be the "helpful" way that COM etc examine the "number format" that's been used on a cell. Example: actual value is 1.234567..... (a float). The "number format" used in Excel causes it to be displayed as $1.23. However what COM etc produce when they extract the data is a "currency" or "money" instance containing $1.2345 which is NEITHER what you see NOR what you've actually got. That's a somewhat Procrustean attitude to "support". > -- which I believe is a > 64-bit INTEGER scaled for four decimal places. > > It's "general" format is a variant type accepting integer, float, > text, date/time (but can't differentiate currency form float on input) Excel has no concept of a variant type. "General" is a "number format", not a data type. Excel has storage types corresponding to Python's float, unicode (16 bit), bool and None, as well as an error type. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
