Re: Money casting too liberal?

On 4/2/2013 12:50 AM, Gavin Flower wrote:
> In the bad old days when I was a COBOL programmer we always stored
> money in the COBOL equivalent of an integer (numeric without a
> fractional part) to avoid round off, but we displayed with a decimal
> point to digits to the left. So storing as an integer (actually bigint
> would be required) is a good idea, with parameters to say how many
> effective digits in the fractional part, and how many fractional
> digits to display etc. - as you said.

COBOL Numeric was BCD. same as NUMERIC in SQL (yes, I know postgresql
internally uses a base 10000 notation for this, storing it as an array
of short ints, but effectively its equivalent to BCD).

--
john r pierce 37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast