« Return to Thread: Why decimal?
Re: Why decimal?
by Brendan Eich-3
::
Rate this Message:
On Jun 23, 2009, at 10:10 AM, Christian Plesner Hansen wrote:
>> Do you consider that naive user's calculator example to be
>> "financial"? I do
>> not.
>
> I don't know, the user doesn't say why this inaccuracy is a problem.
> It sounds like he's just generally unhappy that arithmetic is
> approximate. Decimal is approximate too.
That's true at very extreme margins only! Decimal does not fail to
round power-of-five products so badly, and I think you know this.
13+ years ago, I got a bug report about this calculation:
js> 79.46-39.96
39.49999999999999
This was before we founded mozilla.org, it was about Netscape 2 or 3.
So the bug report prefigured bug 5856.
These dollars and cents calculations are quite common, and decimal
handles them correctly with full precision and no rounding errors.
> Unless the example is set
> in a context where we know we'll stay in base 10, such as financial,
> decimal arithmetic will only give you less accuracy per bit.
Why are you talking about "bits" here?
Base 2 and base 5 are different, and finite precision in the latter
(or base 10) can represent numbers exactly, for which no exact
representation exists or can be rounded nicely using base 2 with any
finite precision.
> As far as I can see none of the reports collected under 5856 ask for
> decimal, what they ask for is accurate arithmetic. Decimal doesn't
> provide that. If people were asking for decimal arithmetic because
> they needed it for some particular financial or scientific application
> then that would be different.
See above. I think you are missing something fundamental about the
problem reported at that bug. Decimal does fix it for the use-cases
reported there and in dups.
> Are there any other uses planned for value types than decimal?
Sure: point, rational, complex, RGBA color, quaternion, .... Some of
these are esoteric, scientific programmers may care (game programmers
too). Others are pretty common on the web.
/be
_______________________________________________
es-discuss mailing list
es-discuss@...
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
>> Do you consider that naive user's calculator example to be
>> "financial"? I do
>> not.
>
> I don't know, the user doesn't say why this inaccuracy is a problem.
> It sounds like he's just generally unhappy that arithmetic is
> approximate. Decimal is approximate too.
That's true at very extreme margins only! Decimal does not fail to
round power-of-five products so badly, and I think you know this.
13+ years ago, I got a bug report about this calculation:
js> 79.46-39.96
39.49999999999999
This was before we founded mozilla.org, it was about Netscape 2 or 3.
So the bug report prefigured bug 5856.
These dollars and cents calculations are quite common, and decimal
handles them correctly with full precision and no rounding errors.
> Unless the example is set
> in a context where we know we'll stay in base 10, such as financial,
> decimal arithmetic will only give you less accuracy per bit.
Why are you talking about "bits" here?
Base 2 and base 5 are different, and finite precision in the latter
(or base 10) can represent numbers exactly, for which no exact
representation exists or can be rounded nicely using base 2 with any
finite precision.
> As far as I can see none of the reports collected under 5856 ask for
> decimal, what they ask for is accurate arithmetic. Decimal doesn't
> provide that. If people were asking for decimal arithmetic because
> they needed it for some particular financial or scientific application
> then that would be different.
See above. I think you are missing something fundamental about the
problem reported at that bug. Decimal does fix it for the use-cases
reported there and in dups.
> Are there any other uses planned for value types than decimal?
Sure: point, rational, complex, RGBA color, quaternion, .... Some of
these are esoteric, scientific programmers may care (game programmers
too). Others are pretty common on the web.
/be
_______________________________________________
es-discuss mailing list
es-discuss@...
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
« Return to Thread: Why decimal?
| Free embeddable forum powered by Nabble | Forum Help |
