[boost] Re: Any interest in a decimal and money class?

From: Stefan Slapeta (stefan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-01-08 18:54:30

Beman Dawes wrote:

[...]

> With the C and C++ committee's working on a decimal arithmetic technical 
> report, have you considered how your library will support future decimal 
> types that come out of that effort? Since at least one major vendor 
> (IBM) apparently intends to support the proposed decimal types in 
> hardware, the new types may be a lot faster on some platforms than 
> decimal types which do not have hardware support.
> 

Bewman,

wasn't it you who recently asked for clarification about the IBM 
licencing for decimal? The one and only currently available 
implementation of the proposed decimal interface is a library that you 
can use for about $3000. This totally conflits with everything what I've 
ever heard about standardization, as it's IMHO very difficult to write 
anything that meets the same interface requirements and doesn't conflict 
with the current implementation!

I myself am not a mathematician, thus I've never been able to seriously 
propose anything for a very important datatype that I myself use very 
frequently (I wrote my own decimal implementation some time ago). 
However, I'm really angry about the dog and pony show to adopt a 
datatype that goes without saying in other programming languagues.

Stefan