Well, some of us (before uqiquitous home computers) actually pulled out the little manual that came with our calculators to learn about "binary coded decimal",

Well, some of us (before uqiquitous home computers) actually pulled out the little manual that came with our calculators to learn about "binary coded decimal", and some didn't. OK, I'm probably giving away too much about my age :-) And some had better things to do anyway... That said, yes, this does get misprogrammed in financial applications very frequently. FWIW, I wrote a little tuturial about this very issue a while back: http://roboprogs.com/devel/2010.02.html http://roboprogs.com/devel/2010.02.html