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

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-01-12 07:39:45

At 02:28 AM 1/12/2005, Martin wrote:

 >> The folks pushing the decimal TR have been claiming that the integer
 >> subset is robust enough to handle the usual integer operations.
 >> Presumably it would include everything needed to implement fixed-point.
 >
 >That is my view as well and that is why I created my decimal64 type. Do 
you
 >mean that we don't need a fixed decimal type since everyone can implement
 >it themselves using integers?

Martin, we are going over a lot of the same ground already covered in the 
review of Bill Seymore's library. I think you should read through a lot of 
those comments.

 >...
 >> don't know if binary would have been more useful than decimal. But 
since
 >> sometimes we were implementing tax related algorithms specified by law 
as
 >> decimal calculations, it was convenient to work in fp-decimal.
 >
 >Laws are different everywhere ofcourse but the ones I have seen specify 
the
 >number of decimals to use in a calculation and not the number of digits.
 >Did you use a fp-decimal type where you could limit the size of the
 >mantissa?

No. The calculations involved petroleum products like propane, with volumes 
ranging from a few gallons to whole underground caverns full of the stuff. 
The volumes have to be temperature compensated with a coefficient of 
expansion. It gets messy.

--Beman