[rstuart4133]

> I work in finance and I use binary floats.

I build cash registers, and I avoid floats like the plague.

I think the difference is where you need an exact result. Auditors have forced me to go through a years transactions to find an 1 cent error. They were right - at one point we weren't handling the fractional cents correctly. After finding that the bug was fixed. Had we been using floating point our answer would have been "shrug, if it's a problem chose another vendor".

You are working in finance so I suspect a 0.00001% error doesn't matter to you. Usually it doesn't. But occasionally, proofs of correctness are important. The can demonstrate for example one of your programmers isn't ripping you off by rounding (0, 0.5) to zero instead of (0, 0.5] and stealing the resulting cents. People have gone to jail for doing exactly that. Which is why, a good auditor can get very picky finding a 1 cent error. He doesn't care about value of that 1c any more that you do. What he cares about greatly is a machine whose job is to add up numbers reliably apparently can't get basic arithmetic right.

Programmer with battle scars from working in that environment are sick and tired of being told by others how much easier floats are to use 99.9999% of the time. Believe me, they know.