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by nine_k
634 days ago
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Neither 0.1 nor 0.01 are representable exactly in binary (much like 1/3 is not representable exactly in decimal). Thus means that your cents, if any, are never precise. Not a big deal for Swift transfers where you can safely round to cents. But various commissions, taxes, and fees are often very small fractions, and rounding errors become noticeable with large quantities of small amounts added / subtracted. They may be too small to matter financially, but they are bothersome because your sums do not match exactly where they should, and this affects trust to the system. IDK about banks; in one billing system where I was involved we used decimals (and clear rules of assignment of the rounding errors), in another, all amounts were in picodollars. |
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Partially Im just playing the devils advocate here, I know that you have to use Decimals for working with prices etc., (maybe they did not use it because it will be pretty fat dependency), but still imho it's not needed.