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Postings from August 2021
On 2021-08-05 1:17 a.m., Ovid via perl5-porters wrote:
> Since we're talking about wishes, would a decimal type be interesting? For
> example, in floating point, you can't represent .3. So the following evaluates
> to false:
>
> Imagine this evaluating as true (fake syntax):
>
> if ( 0 == .1d + .2d - .3d ) { ... }
>
> Many languages currently support decimal data types natively (COBOL, C#) or via
> core libraries (Java, Python).
I would suggest that the simplest implementation is just as a scaled integer.
So its precision would be the same as a Perl integer because it would be
implementing using the same kind of machine integer, likely a 64-bit one.
Is about 18 digits of precision enough or do you need more?
I would expect that should handle fine the finance use case you mention.
In my experience finance apps often use scaled integers implemented at the app
level anyway in absence of a decimal type, say as an integer that counts in
100ths of a currency unit for example.
-- Darren Duncan
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