Re: [boost] Re: Re: Fixed-decimal partial review

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-07-20 19:47:15

At 05:13 PM 7/20/2003, Misha Bergal wrote:

 >Something seems to be wrong to me tough. The programming languages
 >(environments) introduced lately do not implement fixed-point only 
decimal
 >numbers.

Fixed-point is used in applications driven by external requirements, not by 
what is or isn't available in programming languages.

 >...
 >
 >I believe that we might be on the wrong track here. It seems to me that 
we
 >might be doing something obsolete and not needed any more (in form 
proposed
 >by the submitter).

That's possible, but my guess is that it is going to be a long time before 
floating-point becomes acceptable in the broad world of business, industry, 
and government. Try it on your tax return and see what kind of a response 
you get:-?

 >It reminds me the Boost.thread library semaphore discussions, where the
 >A.Terekhov and B.Kempf strongly argued for not including the semaphores 
in
 >Boost.Thread library on the basis of that being an obsolete and unsafe
 >abstraction (please forgive me I am misstating the facts - I haven't
 >followed the discussion closely enough)

Uh... In the applications I have in mind it is floating-point arithmetic 
that has a bad reputation for producing technically correct answers that 
are dead-wrong in terms of the application's needs.

One common way to handle such programming is to used integer arithmetic 
with an implied decimal point. That gets really messy and is subject to 
many programming errors. Having a fixed-point class would seem to be a big 
improvement. Hard to tell for sure without using such a class in practical 
applications, however.

--Beman