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0 pointslmilcin6y ago0 comments

I did not say floats are random. But when you do accounting you need to be able to sum large sets of numbers and compare results with another sum of different numbers and the sum must match. This just does not work with FP.

Poor souls that use FP for accounting are scourge of the industry and source of jokes.

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chrisseaton6y ago

That's what I used to think, then I met these banking types, and they told me 'no we understand their semantics and we use them correctly and we know it is safe for our programs.' These teams have compiler experts on them - they aren't ignorant.

lmilcinOP6y ago

I started working on accounting software in 2002 and right now work for Citi. Compiler experts in accounting? If you are doing HFT you are not doing accounting. Accounting is what happens later when all those transactions need to actually be accounted for and balance calculated

_y5hn6y ago

If you rely on compiler implementations for accounting, you're already lost.

For anything imprecise and scientific, doubles will normally work well.

Accounting rules regarding truncation and rounding as specified, seems unaccounted for by most until they meet such stringent reqs.

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