recovery

[Derek Atkins]

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

>
>> Long ago, gnucash stored its data in binary, with its amounts of money
>> recorded in binary floating-point.  I pointed out that this was not
>> adequate for financial data, wiere pennies matter on amounts line a
>> billion dollars, and the roundoff errors involved in binary/decimal
>> conversion are ultimately unacceptable.
>>
>> This started a revolution in which money would be represented in exact
>> form; as it happens they chose character strings that represented
>> amounts as an intergal number of tiny units of currency.  For my
>> accounts, this unit turned out to be a penny.  I gather it's different
>> for stock-trading accounts.
>>
>>
>>
> Suggestion (from somebody who used to do "financial" software for a living)
>
> That solution would be unnecessarily slow (repeated data conversion back
> and forth). The database and all calculations can be integer and only
> when the figures are to be displayed are they edited (decimal point
> inserted at the appropriate place). AKA "scaled decimal" representation.
> Fairly easy to write "edit mask" functions if not directly supported by
> language/hardware (precisely because of this usage COBOL and the IBM
> mainframes used in "financial" work provide for "edit mask" as a
> primitive ---- in other words, you can define a "mask" specifying fairly
> complex number editing and that determines how that number DISPLAYS)

Historically this doesn't work.   How do you represent 1/3 in decimal?

> Michael

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-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