🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ROCKWELL.92Apr16202815@socrates.umd.edu> rockwell@socrates.umd.edu (Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell) writes:
|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?

Because floating point numbers buy exponent at the expense of the
mantissa. It's sort of the idea.... As soon as you kick over into
float, 8 or 16 lsb's go away. So suddenly you are computing in units
of whole dollars. And then, every time the number doubles again, away
goes another bit at the bottom.

I don't understand how we can possibly be disagreeing here.
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stephen p spackman         Center for Information and Language Studies
stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu                    University of Chicago
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