Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!otter!kers
From: kers@otter.hpl.hp.com (Chris Dollin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Re: Who uses BASIC these days (for serious application writing)
Message-ID: <2400024@otter.hpl.hp.com>
Date: 22 May 89 08:30:48 GMT
References: <8900@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK.
Lines: 19

Someone (damn, I deleted the header lines) said:

(begin quote)

It is clear to anyone who thinks about it that both answers alluded to above
are wrong.  Use of integers (even considering only the case of US money
amounts) to scale money to cents (eg: $100 = 10000 cents) limits you to values
less than about $43 million.  If you have to keep track of more decimal places
and scale accordingly (the value of stock shares to five decimal places, for
example), the limit on the magnitude is correspondingly less.

(end quote)

You're restricted to $43M only if you restrict yourself to 32-bit (unsigned?)
arithmetic. Multiple-precision arithmetic is hardly a big deal, especially when
you're not likely to be doing big multiplications (quick - what's $35M * Y72M?)

Regards,    | "Baby Bear has had a busy day. What a big yawn! Baby Bear	
Kers.       | is sleepy; it's nearly time for bed."