What library to use for arbitrary precision decimals

What library to use for arbitrary precision decimals

[Richard Jones]

What library / type should I be using for arbitrary precision decimals
- ie. floats where I can store things like currency amounts without
getting rounding errors?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com

Re: [Caml-list] What library to use for arbitrary precision decimals

[Christophe TROESTLER]

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org> wrote:
> 
> What library / type should I be using for arbitrary precision decimals
> - ie. floats where I can store things like currency amounts without
> getting rounding errors?

For some time I have been thinking to implement the following
spec. but I never found the time...

http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:H663GV4FII4J:www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/+decimal+arithmetic&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1

Cheers,
ChriS

What library to use for arbitrary precision decimals

[Joshua Smith]

There are a couple of ways to handle money transactions without
rounding errors.

You could use the Nums library, which provides arbitrary precision
calculations and numbers.   But even with arbitrary precision numbers,
you still can have the situation where you get 405.0345 which if this
were USD, you would still have to round if you wanted to pay someone
this amount.  You will still have the arbitrary precision this way,
however.

The best way to handle money (in my experience) is to use integers. 
Then you can define conversion functions but only have to convert it
to decimal for display purposes.  That way, even if you do a million
transactions you won't lose any information.   You can also handle
non-decimal based currencies/instruments/transactions that way[1]

HTH

-jbs

[1] yes,  there are a (thank god shrinking number) of commodities and
stuff like that in the world that don't use decimal prices.