Is there an equivalent of the decimal type in D?
Myron Alexander
someone at somewhere.com
Fri Jan 26 19:27:09 PST 2007
Sean Kelly wrote:
> Myron Alexander wrote:
>> Hello.
>>
>> I want to work with numbers without having to worry about binary
>> representation. I work with currencies and other such values that must
>> be absolute. In Java I have BigDecimal and in Python I have decimal.
>
> For finance, isn't round-off error more of an issue than internal
> representation?
>
>
> Sean
Internal representation is not the issue. I need stable and predictable
handling of arithmetic operations and display. With floats and double,
workarounds exist but they are cumbersome and not guaranteed. Also,
different compilers and C/FPUs can handle floats and doubles slightly
differently; not a problem currently but may be a problem for the
future. A decimal type sacrifices raw performance for guaranteed decimal
accuracy.
It has been a long time since I had to deal with floats and doubles
since I do most of my work with BigDecimal; the type of applications do
not seem to suffer in performance, they are mostly io bound. I have read
several papers on float handling including, what I have been told is the
holy text: http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html.
If you have any links to guides on how to handle floating point to
achieve predictable accuracy, could you please post them as I can't say
that I understand that problem space as well as I used to.
Regards,
Myron.
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