Re: Debian GnuCash packages orphaned
On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 14:21, William Ballard wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 02:07:31PM +1000, bob parker wrote:
> > On Mon, 9 Aug 2004 13:20, John Summerfield wrote:
> > > As for the money, I learned to write financial applications in COBOL.
> > > Whoops, it's extremely rusty.
> > > mony PIC S9(11v3) COMP-3.
> > > and in PL/1
> > > money fixed dec(11,3).
> >
> > COBOL, such a beutiful language! If a total overflows the destination
> > field it just chops off the most significant digit. Perfect for Enron and
> > naturally the Pentagon for whom it was originally designed.
>
> Accounting will get a lot easier when native 64-bit ints are more
> widespread. Then you can just keep six significant digits (up to ten
> thousandth of penny) and do all calcuations as integers scaled by
> 100,000.
>
> I got hit with this when I was doing a job for a major Dutch insurance
> company and had to validate several hundred thousand transactions
> totalling 500 billion guilders and make sure all the accounts matched to
> the "penny." I couldn't use fake numbers -- too slow.
>
> I did it all in double precision scaled to 12 places or so and made sure
> it matched to "machine precision." Bit harder than dealing with less
> than $4 billion worth of stuff, which fits in 32 bits.
Money calcs are rather difficult at present. Just wondering how fast or
otherwise ascii numeric arithmetic ops are. Eg DEC Dibol used ascii numbers
and was still fairly speedy even on a PDP11 (later model toward the end of
that product's life).
bob
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