Re: Floating Point and Financial Software

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

Kurt Vile writes:
> The Federal Reserve Bank, European Ecomonic Community, England,  
> France, Germany, Japan, Canada, etc store their historical data in a  
> time series database called FAME, which does 64 bit representation  
> of floating point data....

FAME is NOT an accounting package. I'm talking about accounting. 

> The Options Clearing Corporation does all of their clearing in 64  
> bit floats, for one.

Options are traded in integral units. Why would they use floats for
counting them?

> Swiss Bank/O'connor, NationsBank/CRT, Fannie Mae, Merril Lynch use  
> NeXT's as their trading platform so you can rest assured that they  
> are using 64's

1) Most of those firms have used *some* NeXT machines, none have used
   them exclusively. (My friends who were at Swiss Bank used HPs. My
   friends at M-L use Suns). In any case, it doesn't matter. Why would
   the native floating point representation of the machine have
   anything to do with accounting? Most of the accounting in those
   firms wasn't ever done on their trading platforms at all anyway --
   many of them still do all their accounting on mainframes, and
   whether they use mainframes or not they tend to write their
   accounting on top of database packages that have exact numerical
   representations available for money. The accounting systems are in
   any case back office systems, not front office systems, and have
   nothing to do with the trading platforms.

Perry