On Sun, 06 Feb 2000 09:12:55 PST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Rob Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> I am at a quandry as to what to ask for for decimal places. What is
> bonking me in the head is a _ton_ of .0000 in the stock register.
> This is in the Bought and Sold columns. I was going to say, "Who ever
> buys *part* of a share?", but then I remembered my parents having a
> mutual fund where all shares were priced at 1.00, and you purchased
> them in parts of a share. sigh.
Actually, it's a more pervasive issue than you think.
I have a Merrill Lynch statement in front of me indicating numbers of
shares that I purchased through my employer's stock purchase plan.
In October, I bought 1.2572 shares, in November, 1.3270 shares, in
December, 1.2652 shares. My holdings amount to 46.8680 shares.
And that's fractional shares in Sabre Inc, a decidedly publicly traded
company.
> The only thing which makes sense to me is (yet another) user option.
> You could set it to be "automatic", or "fixed", where "fixed" would
> give you an value field.
>
> If it is set to automatic, then the values would only display the
> significant digits. Closing prices wouldn't be 218.0000, 219.1250,
> 190.5000, but they would be 218, 219.125, 190.5.
>
> I think that this would be cool, but not in the balance column, where
> forcing it to two decimal places could be default.
That's probably pretty appropriate.
One thing that I find *highly* regrettable is that the world appears
to have concluded that the NYSE approach of having ticker prices
expressed in 16ths of a dollar is "far inferior" to using decimal
amounts.
<grumble>
16ths happen to be *very nice* values from the perspective of trying
to do exact arithmetic on binary computers. With 16ths, it works out
nicely, with *no* repeating decimals or anything else of the sort.
With decimal values, 0.10 cannot be exactly represented as a floating
point value; it turns, in binary, into a repeating binary value, which
means that you generally cannot readily do exact arithmetic in decimal
on computers.
</grumble>
I want 32 bit computers to go away so that we can exclusively use 64
bit ints for monetary amounts...
--
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and
hard to light.
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