5 ms·

I think gp's point is that 0.33... is "an amount (when talking about money) you don't want to represent (when we're talking about maintaining balances)" precise

I think gp's point is that 0.33... is "an amount (when talking about money) you don't want to represent (when we're talking about maintaining balances)" precisely because you, and everybody else, is so used to decimal that it disappears. There's nothing intrinsic about 1/10 that makes it "rounder" than 1/3, except as an artifact of the numbering system. Aliens with three hands with three fingers each, whose societies got used to base 9, would think 1/3 looks much "rounder", and 1/10 is the one you'd never want to represent.

roel_v 11y ago
No. It's not that a gum costs 5 cents because it's the only fraction of a dollar that can be represented in cents, it's because pricing is inherently done in one-cent increments. If there was a need to price single items at a lower-than-a-cent cost, or at prices between one-cent increments, and if the need for that outweighed the disadvantages, there would be a way to do it. Other example: an apple doesn't cost 1/3 of a dollar, it costs 33 cents. The need for pricing things as a fraction is simply not there. I doubt most people would see 20 cents as '1/5 of a dollar' in the first place. This might be a difference between people thinking in metric and thinking in imperial, too. (I'm metric, fwiw). (before someone says 'I buy resistors that cost less than a cent', please show me a place that sells them individually)