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vartec
vartec
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It's a common misconception, that everywhere you're dealing with money, you should store it's value as integer (cents). While in some simple cases like on-line store it's true, if you have something more advanced it doesn't help much.

Let's have example: a developer makes $100,000 a year. What is his exact month's salary? Using integer you get result $8333.33 (¢833333), which multiplied by 12 is $99,999.96. Did keeping it as integer help? No, it didn't.

Do banks always use decimal/integer values? Well, they do for transactional part. But for example as soon as you start talking investment banking, with exception of keeping track of actual transactions, everything else is floats. Since it's all in-house code, you won't see it, but you can take a peak at QuantLibQuantLib, which is essentially the same (except much cleaner ;-).

Why use floats? Because using decimal doesn't help at all when you're using functions like square root, logarithms, powers with non-integer exponents etc. And of course floats are way faster than Decimal types.

It's a common misconception, that everywhere you're dealing with money, you should store it's value as integer (cents). While in some simple cases like on-line store it's true, if you have something more advanced it doesn't help much.

Let's have example: a developer makes $100,000 a year. What is his exact month's salary? Using integer you get result $8333.33 (¢833333), which multiplied by 12 is $99,999.96. Did keeping it as integer help? No, it didn't.

Do banks always use decimal/integer values? Well, they do for transactional part. But for example as soon as you start talking investment banking, with exception of keeping track of actual transactions, everything else is floats. Since it's all in-house code, you won't see it, but you can take a peak at QuantLib, which is essentially the same (except much cleaner ;-).

Why use floats? Because using decimal doesn't help at all when you're using functions like square root, logarithms, powers with non-integer exponents etc. And of course floats are way faster than Decimal types.

It's a common misconception, that everywhere you're dealing with money, you should store it's value as integer (cents). While in some simple cases like on-line store it's true, if you have something more advanced it doesn't help much.

Let's have example: a developer makes $100,000 a year. What is his exact month's salary? Using integer you get result $8333.33 (¢833333), which multiplied by 12 is $99,999.96. Did keeping it as integer help? No, it didn't.

Do banks always use decimal/integer values? Well, they do for transactional part. But for example as soon as you start talking investment banking, with exception of keeping track of actual transactions, everything else is floats. Since it's all in-house code, you won't see it, but you can take a peak at QuantLib, which is essentially the same (except much cleaner ;-).

Why use floats? Because using decimal doesn't help at all when you're using functions like square root, logarithms, powers with non-integer exponents etc. And of course floats are way faster than Decimal types.

Source Link
vartec
vartec
  • 20.8k
  • 1
  • 53
  • 98

It's a common misconception, that everywhere you're dealing with money, you should store it's value as integer (cents). While in some simple cases like on-line store it's true, if you have something more advanced it doesn't help much.

Let's have example: a developer makes $100,000 a year. What is his exact month's salary? Using integer you get result $8333.33 (¢833333), which multiplied by 12 is $99,999.96. Did keeping it as integer help? No, it didn't.

Do banks always use decimal/integer values? Well, they do for transactional part. But for example as soon as you start talking investment banking, with exception of keeping track of actual transactions, everything else is floats. Since it's all in-house code, you won't see it, but you can take a peak at QuantLib, which is essentially the same (except much cleaner ;-).

Why use floats? Because using decimal doesn't help at all when you're using functions like square root, logarithms, powers with non-integer exponents etc. And of course floats are way faster than Decimal types.