Larry Wall wrote:
but probably what the financial insitutions want is special fixed-point types that assume a divisor anyway. Would any financial institution care to comment?
Some (VAT tax) computations are defined, by law, to be executed with a cetain precision. You have to be able to control the precision at any point during a computation.
The need for precision control may have a wider range. In the EGNOS project, they used to define data types, represented as binary integers of N (8, 16, 32, 40, 48, 64,...) bit with a manyfold of interpretations for the value of the LSB, e.g. 0.01 meter, or 1/2**7 meter, or 1/2**16 seconds. Wolfgang
Larry
