Re: The Crisis with Remailers

[mpd@netcom.com (Mike Duvos)]

Perry Writes:

> Floating point systems are built to do approximate math on a very wide
> range of number sizes. Accounting systems require exact math -- down
> to the cent. Floats aren't suitable.

Calling floating point math "approximate" is a bit of a misnomer.  
Floating point numbers all correspond to exact points on the real 
number line.  The floating point number taken as the result of an 
operation, if that result is not another floating point number, is 
always chosen consistantly in a way which has minimum error and zero
bias. 

Floating point numbers can be used to do exact integer arithmetic
quite easily.  A 48 bit mantissa can represent 14 decimal digit signed
integers with no loss of precision, and $999,999,999,999.99 is more
than enough magnitude for most bean counters. 

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