| 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... |