On 01/25/2014 10:19 PM, Keith Winston wrote:
On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 3:57 AM, spir <denis.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
Note: AFAIK most financial software use integers for this reason and to
avoid (or control) rounding errors.
I don't think this is true (no flame intended, hopefully you know I'm
forever in your debt Denis): there's a famous scam where insiders at a
major financial institution set the software so it always rounds down,
and the difference was deposited in their account. It was a matter of
fractions of pennies on a per-scam basis. I'm not certain if this ever
actually happened (I thought it did, but Snopes seems agnostic).
http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/salami.asp
There's a similar story in France as well, but it was several decades ago.
Incendentally, I used to know several people involved in financial software
companies; they did use integers for all computations. Maybe today they use
decimals, dunno (since then, decimal libs have become far more famous and used).
d
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