[piadodjanho]

Sorry, but you actually sounds like one those people who dosen't really know how FP work.

> I shudder to think how many e-commerce sites use `float` for financial transactions!

The float IEEE-754 represent up to 9 decimal digits (or 23 binary digits) with precision. The double, represent 17 decimal digits. The error upper bound is (0.00000000000000001)/2 per operation. Likely irrelevant for most e-commerce.

Also, the database stores in currency values using fixed point.

> Intel chips have had BCD support in machine code

BCD is floating point encoding not fixed point. AFAIK, only Intel supports it and very precariously.

> I'm surprised nobody has made a decent fixed point lib that is widely used already.

Nonsense. If you do any scientific computation you have likely have Boost, GMP, MPFR installed in your system. They support arbitrary precision arithmetic with integer (aka fixed point), rational and floating point.

[antonyme]

> Sorry, but you actually sounds like one those people who dosen't really know how FP work.

LOL, sure ok. Worked on banking systems for 2 years and been doing scientific computing for many more. Pretty comfortable with fixed and floating point.

> [error bounds] Likely irrelevant for most e-commerce.

Those bounds are theoretical, and there are plenty of occasions I have come across in the past when rounding errors were observed. It was forbidden in the bank to use floating point! We went to enormous lengths to ensure numerical accuracy and stability across systems.

I think this article has a pretty good explanation:

https://dzone.com/articles/never-use-float-and-double-for-mo...

> Nonsense. If you do any scientific computation you have likely have Boost, GMP, MPFR installed in your system. They support arbitrary precision arithmetic with integer (aka fixed point), rational and floating point.

Yes, absolutely right; I have used several of those 3rd party libs myself, as well as hand-rolling fixed point code (esp for embedded systems). I didn't write what I intended. I meant to say that very few languages have first-class fixed point in their standard library. So long as the simple `float` is available as a POD, people will (mis-)use it.

I think in a general purpose HLL, a fixed decimal type should be the default, and you should have to opt in to IEEE-754 floating point.

[piadodjanho]

First, I would like to apologize for my attitude on the original post, my choice of words was very inappropriate for this forum. Second. I would like to thank you for bringing another point of view.

I'm talking about the average joe e-commerce. The precision requirement of Financial institution and large e-commerce are more strict than most website. For the average e-commerce the extra cost of using a decimal arithmetic framework might not be reasonable. Of course, software engineers should use currency types when they are available.

> https://dzone.com/articles/never-use-float-and-double-for-mo...

The example used by the website is misleading. They print a value with all the significant digits. In reality, e-commerces are only concerned with two digits after the decimal point. I run the same program in C with one billion (-1) iterations and the printed value with two decimal digits was exact. It was the the as it would be if I used decimal arithmetic.

> I think in a general purpose HLL, a fixed decimal type should be the default, and you should have to opt in to IEEE-754 floating point.

Most modern languages have some support to rational, fixed point and currency arithmetic. Nowadays, even GCC's C supports Fixed Point arithmetic [1].

The hardware implementation of floating point arithmetic is concerned about efficiency hardware and support for a lot of uses cases. The ranges and accuracy needed in different application varies widely. The BCD encoding is very inefficient hardware-wise compared to binary encoding.

In summary, I do agree people with working currencies should use the proper currency type, but I also think using IEEE 754 is usually fine, specially in the front-end. Also, I don't think the trade offs of changing from binary arithmetic to decimal arithmetic are not worth it for most people and hardware system.

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.9.0/gcc/Fixed-Point.htm...