Decimal arithmatic, was Re: Python GUI app to impress the bos s?

[Delaney, Timothy]

> From: danb_83 at yahoo.com [mailto:danb_83 at yahoo.com]
> 
> "Stuart D. Gathman" <stuart at bmsi.com> wrote in message 
> news:<amo0aq$5nf$1 at nntp2-cm.news.eni.net>...
> >...
> > There ought to be severe penalties for idiots that use 
> floating point
> > dollars for financial applications.  If forced to use floating point
> > (e.g. because customer demands BASIC), then keep money amounts in
> > whole pennies (or whatever the smallest currency unit for 
> the country
> > is), and divide by 100 (or whatever) for printing only (or 
> just add the
> > decimal point yourself).
> 
> That's exactly how things were done at my old workplace, except that
> cents were also used for user input.  Most of the time.

It's called Fixed Point arithmetic, and strangely enough, Tim Peters wrote
an excellent implementation ...

Tim Delaney