Richard Wackerbarth writes:
> On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > > Each currency has its own "primitive" amount and all transactions are
> > > conducted in terms of that unit. Prices are often expressed to a higher
> > > precision or as a rational fraction of that unit.
> >
> > This suggests that we should be storing integers that indicate
> > how many of the primitive amount are to be used. For US$ this would
> > be an exact count of pennies.
>
> I believe that this is the correct approach.
I don't think this is very practical. There are well over 100
currencies in circulation and keeping track of them is not a small
task. Also, it's not just a matter of gathering the information once,
because, as someone has already pointed out, the 'primitive' amount of
a currency can change. Furthermore, gnucash also should be able to
track mutual fund shares, precious metal quantities, and anything else
of financial value that users might wish, in whatever accuracy they
want.
If the use of floating points becomes an issue, I think a better
solution would be to use an arbitrary precision library. We would
still get absolute accuracy, but we would dispense with the need to
track 'primitive units' for every currency/whatever that people might
wish to count.
dave
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