🚀 go-pugleaf

Robert Bernecky:
   [Morgan Stanley and stock market crash, fall 1990]:
   |  Morgan's APL-based system not only didn't die (integers went to
   |  real instead of getting integer overflow death), but the system
   |  didn't fall behind, AND Morgan made a profit that day!

Stephen P Spackman:
   This is a practise that will LITERALLY send you to prison in most
   countries. Financial calculations MUST be performed to 100ths of a
   cent (or whatever local law prescribes) and must NOT be rounded
   except as permitted by law.

Eh?  Why would the numbers be rounded?

If integers become large enough to exceed 2 billion pennies (or Lyra,
or whatever it was that was overflowing the statically allocated
space), you can represent them as floating point without any loss of
precision.

Now, sure, they'll have problems when the the numbers get a few
million times larger than this.  And, maybe, if the US economy keeps
going the way it has, you'll see numbers like that next year.  But a
safety net (even if it's not a shiny new one) is nice to have.

   I am literally shocked that you would consider this a good solution
   to a practical problem.

I'm suprised you think that there would have been rounding problems.
But I guess it's a common superstition.

-- 
Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell                   <rockwell@socrates.umd.edu>