On Mon, 01 Jun 2015 17:07:18 +0200, Laura Creighton wrote:
> In a message of Mon, 01 Jun 2015 14:57:02 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa writes:
>>In 1951, decimal numbers would have done little good in the UK with the
>>pound divided into 20 shillings and the shilling into 12 pence. Maybe a
>>"Babylonian" module would have been perfect.
>>
>>
>>Marko
>
> You are being facetious, but in point of fact, naive Brits who knew
> nothing of neither accounting systems nor floating point for the most
> part got things right when they bought their Sinclair computer in the
> early 1980s.
>
> This is because their natural tendancy was to calculate all the pounds
> separately, and then the shillings, separately, and then the pence.
> (With Guineas and other odd stuff thrown in, when the needed them).
> This meant that they kept 3+ legers at one time, and then, when they
> were done calculating as one final step converted what they had into its
> representation where you never had more than 100 pence or 12 shillings.
> Thus, entirely by accident, they did their accounting in integers, not
> decimals at all.
>
> And this is, of course, the first thing that people who write real
> systems that add money learn -- convert everything to pennies (or
> whatever you call them) and do all your calculations in pennies, and
> then as the final step express that in dollars and cents, or euros and
> cents, or what have you.
>
> The Brits still got in trouble when they needed to calculate things for
> their 4.2 per cent morgage, or decided to keep a running total of the
> sales tax they were paying, but they at least did not grab the floating
> number representation as the first thing off the shelf when they needed
> money.
>
> Laura
I don't think anyone programmed a Sinclair computer to use pre-decimal
currency, we converted to decimal in 1971 (although the last pre-decimal
coin did not go out of use untill 1993)
--
If I traveled to the end of the rainbow
As Dame Fortune did intend,
Murphy would be there to tell me
The pot's at the other end.
-- Bert Whitney
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