Re: Decimal: Formal review begins.

From: Klemens Morgenstern (klemensdavidmorgenstern_at_[hidden])
Date: 2025-01-20 16:52:47

On Wed, Jan 15, 2025 at 5:34 PM John Maddock via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> The review of the proposed Decimal Number library by Matt Borland and
> Chris Kormanyos begins today and runs until 22nd Jan.
>
> You will find documentation here:
> https://cppalliance.org/decimal/decimal.html
>
> And the code repository is here: https://github.com/cppalliance/decimal/
>
> Boost.Decimal is an implementation of IEEE 754
> <https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/754/6210/> and ISO/IEC DTR 24733
> <https://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2009/n2849.pdf>
> Decimal Floating Point numbers. The library is header-only, has no
> dependencies, and requires C++14.
>

Thanks to Matt & Chris for submitting your library for review. From
glancing at the docs it looks great. However, I got a very basic question:

What are the actual applications for decimal floating points? Where are
they used or where would potential users want to use them?

Why wouldn't one just use fixed-point arithmetic when the binary floating
points don't provide the proper rounding behaviour?