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Re: The Crisis with Remailers
[email protected] writes:
> Despite the ugliness of floating point arithmetic (lack of
> associativity, for example) and my general distaste for it, I would
> have to agree that 64-bit floats are higher precision than 32-bit
> fixed-points, since more than half the bits are mantissa.
However, accounting systems DO NOT use 32 bit fixed point arithmetic.
One client of mine had around $10Billion under management. Do you
think they were doing their accounting on a system that could only
deal with fixed point numbers of 45Million or so? Hell, individual
trades are larger.
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.
Anyone who needs to understand why should go off and read Knuth,
Volume 2.
{erru