recovery

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>Umm.. I understand exactly how gnucash stores it, but you miseed my
>point.  The person I was responding to was suggesting that numbers get
>stored as decimal, and I was asking THAT person how you would suggest
>that we store a decimal number that represents the number 1/3. 
>
The person to whom you were responding was talking about storing 
FINANCIAL (accounting) data, not numbers in general.

Forget for a moment that we are talking about a computerized accounting 
function. Pretend doing it the old fashioned way, pen on ruled 
accounting paper. That was in decimal units, no fractions. Yes of course 
"fractions" could seem to come into it in the sense say there were three 
partners, profits to be divided evenly. But the point is that the 
transaction (moving the profit or loss to the equity accounts of the 
three partners) would NOT be recorded as them all getting down to a 
third of a cent! Instead some sort of rule would have been decided who 
gets the odd cent.

Michael

PS: Using "reals" does NOT solve the problem of fractions. You still 
have roundoff errors. Heck, I'm the sort of person who used to have to 
calculate the right "fuzz" amount (maximum accumulated roundoff errors 
in a calculation) so that compares could work.