-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hi again Matts, This conversation has been thorough enough already that perhaps it is time to take it off-lists. I think that you are unaware of the difference between floating point numbers (e.g. the 'IEEE 754' 32 bit floating point number spec) and fixed-point numbers which are used to represent amounts other than "units" of a thing. (E.g., use a 32-bit integer and say that it represents millionths of an apple. You can now represent anything from 0.000001 apples to 4294.967295 apples with no loss of precision.) There are also many other ways to represent different kinds of numbers, including multi-precision integers and rationals, imaginary and complex numbers, etc. I reiterate that floating point numbers are for convenience when dealing with values whose precision is unimportant. Anyone who encodes real money into a float is dumb.
What do you think will happen if you have a one italian lira coin and you try to deposit it with Mark Twain's USD account? With integer math it won't be pretty.
It will be _very_ pretty. Stay tuned. :-) Regards, Bryce -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2i Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.1b2 iQB1AwUBMaMp1kjbHy8sKZitAQFlBwMAwhwLBvPvKMwjzWMj/HMDrzlws9CRwPxd ylBIIWCnaChUafO9Gbjptd12A+nRlwgMJ27N+aY5GCcUu6jlVZz2j7jtxOqMMwNm VFHs0itk7hotPGAoFBF4i4iB0YG1C0Ih =y5zo -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----