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You know, I never really understood the point of decimal floats. Why use floats at all if the point is to express beeps and dollar ppm? You might as well just p
by microcolonel 9y ago
You know, I never really understood the point of decimal floats. Why use floats at all if the point is to express beeps and dollar ppm? You might as well just pick a fraction size and use uint64_t to my mind, or just some bigint type (which is still going to be faster than decimal floats).
- macdice 9y agoThe point is that it's hard to pick the fraction size. US national debt vs Italian lira/Swiss franc exhange rate, humans generate numbers of wide ranging scales and yet it's convenient for computers to deal in fixed size datatypes. Hence floating scale. But yeah, it's a compromise. I expect these new types to catch on and be added to various language standards over the coming years, but we'll see.
- DenisM 9y agoSmall parts, like screws, can be priced in microdollars for accounting purposes. At the same time the US GDP is on the order of $20 trillion. 64 bit is not large enough to fit both of these types of numbers. Makes using SQLITE a real pain...