recovery

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com>:

>
>> 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.

Oh, I understand, but historically shares of stock (or, more accurately,
share prices) were distinguished by fractions, not by decimals.  So, yes,
you MIGHT need to specify "1/3" in your financial data because you might
have shares of stock at $23 1/3 per share.

> 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.

OH?  I've never accounted on paper myself so I don't know, but I'd expect
that you'd still need to put down "23 1/3" as a share price..

> 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.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available