At 11:40 PM 5/23/96, Paul S. Penrod wrote:

But there is a simpler method to avoid the problem entirely. There is suffcient horsepower in uP's these days to support "long hand" division and multiplication. Granted it takes some extra grey matter to write the routines, but once done, you can vary the amount of precision to whatever you desire and not have to worry about accuracy.

I've been skipping most of the "floatingpointpunks" messags, but will note that several languages I personally use (however infrequently) have "bignum" support and support full-precision calculations. These include: LISP and Scheme, Smalltalk, and Mathematica. If performance is not an issue, the bignum packages available in C and C++ ought to be sufficient for any financial needs. And Hal Finney is working on a bignum package for Java. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."