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There are some regulations in bond pricing or international banking or stuff like that that require over 25 decimal places. IIRC, the best COBOL or whatever co

There are some regulations in bond pricing or international banking or stuff like that that require over 25 decimal places. IIRC, the best COBOL or whatever could do on the IBM 360's was 15 digits. The smaller, cheaper, and older 1401 business machines didn't have any limit. Of course, for nerdy financial applications, compound interest and discounting of future money would require exponentiation, which was damn-near tragic on all those old machines. So was trying to add or subtract 2 numbers that were using the maximum number of digits, but with a different number of decimal places, or trying to multiply or divide numbers that each used the maximum number decimal places, with the decimal point in various positions, and it was suicide-adjacent to try to evaluate any expression that included multiple max precision numbers in which both multiplication and division each happened at least twice.

carlos_rpn 1y ago
> There are some regulations in bond pricing or international banking or stuff like that that require over 25 decimal places. Sounds interesting. Is there anywhere you know I can read about it, or is there something specific I can search for? All results I'm getting are unrelated.
- lucas_membrane 1y ago
  Sorry, not that I know of. They never let me near that stuff, and the various really important standards bodies are monopoly providers of information, so they inevitably charge more for copies of their standards than non-subservients like me can afford. I just tried to quickly scan the 25,000+ ISO standards and did not find anything even possibly related under $100. The Securities Industry Association was the maven of bonds when I was trying to figure them out, but, knock me over with a feather, they were dissolved almost 20 years ago. You might start with the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the Financial Markets Standards Board, the Bank for International Settlements, the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation, or https://www.bis.org/publ/mktc13.pdf https://www.bis.org/publ/mktc13.pdf.

carlos_rpn 1y ago

> There are some regulations in bond pricing or international banking or stuff like that that require over 25 decimal places. Sounds interesting. Is there anywhere you know I can read about it, or is there something specific I can search for? All results I'm getting are unrelated.

lucas_membrane 1y ago
Sorry, not that I know of. They never let me near that stuff, and the various really important standards bodies are monopoly providers of information, so they inevitably charge more for copies of their standards than non-subservients like me can afford. I just tried to quickly scan the 25,000+ ISO standards and did not find anything even possibly related under $100. The Securities Industry Association was the maven of bonds when I was trying to figure them out, but, knock me over with a feather, they were dissolved almost 20 years ago. You might start with the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the Financial Markets Standards Board, the Bank for International Settlements, the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation, or https://www.bis.org/publ/mktc13.pdf https://www.bis.org/publ/mktc13.pdf.