Why not FP for Money?

[Paul Rubin]

"John Burton" <john.burton at jbmail.com> writes:
> Yes you could probably "fix" the rounding to make it work in
> practice but the problems is that it is simply not possible to
> represent the value 1.13 in a floating point variable exactly and
> when dealing with money you want to represent it exacctly,
> particularly as it's so easy to do.

The Decimal Floating Point pages that Tim linked to are really fantastic.
I remember going to a talk by some of the MIPS CPU designers a long time
ago, and they explained they left decimal arithmetic out of their RISC
design because they'd instrumented a bunch of Cobol programs and found
that arithmetic simply wasn't where financial applications spent their
computation time.  However, the DFP site shows some pretty interesting
benchmarks.