Re: Debian GnuCash packages orphaned
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.
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