[TriLUG] Money in mysql

[Phillip Rhodes]

Following up on my own last message, here is a link
to a paper titled "What Every Computer Scientist
Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic."  It's
something someone on the JUG list pointed out to me
a while back.  It's very deep, possibly more so than
needed by the average programmer. But at least it serves
as a good reference on the subject, and contains info
on the IEEE standard I was referring to before.

If nothing else, it would probably be important to
know whether your chosen environment (langauge / hardware )
conforms to that spec or not... if it does, then at least
you'll know you have a certain level of guaranteed behavior
you can depend on.

And again, some languages may take care of this for
you by providing a special datatype for currency.  Which
of course leads back to the original question of which
type of field to store those values in.  Dang, guess
I haven't been much help at all.  :-)

http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html


TTYL,

Phil