Humans have too many fingers

To calculate dollars "accurately" with 2 decimal places, you need to calculate right from the beginning in cents as integers!

So just calculate with integers in the desired accuracy and shift the decimal point afterwards˛!

Floats are not accurate with decimal fractions because the computer "has only two fingers".

Just try to express 1/3 accurately in decimal system!

And now imagine you're an alien with 3 fingers ⁴ and you have only computers that calculate in decimal fractionsš... wouldn't this annoy you, too?

Humans have too many fingers! Downsizing ł to octal system would do it...

Cheers Rolf

Footnotes:

(š) I have a faint memory of processors with special modes allowing to calculate in decimal system... was it 6502 or 68000? Must be the latter ...
... indeed "Although the 68000 has a 16-bit data bus... internally it can operate on ... 4-bit binary coded decimal (BCD), ..."
(˛) The shift must be a string operation. Dividing by 100 reintroduces the problem with floats!
(ł) added some images like of human reengineering. (... another - though bloody -rule of thumb ;-)
(⁴) in a ternary system 0.1 exactly represents 1/3 in decimal.

Comment on Humans have too many fingers

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: perl floating number addition by ig (Vicar) on Jul 18, 2009 at 15:27 UTC
Many modern processors also have support for Binary Coded Decimal (BCD) calculations, including Pentium, Itanium, PA-RISC, IBM mainframes and others. These capabilities can be used with assembly code programming or use of appropriate libraries. Standardization of decimal arithmetic was added to the new IEEE 754 2008 standard.	[reply]
Re^2: perl floating number addition by spx2 (Deacon) on Jul 18, 2009 at 17:42 UTC
So just calculate with integers in the desired accuracy and shift the decimal point afterwards˛! I agree , that's what I'd do also	[reply]


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