Decimal V Binary??

From: Lyle Bickley <lbickley_at_bickleywest.com>
Date: Thu Sep 23 00:12:28 2004

Having spent four and a half years running IT at the Philadelphia Federal
Reserve Bank and almost ten years responsible for Investment Quantitative
Analysis, Trust Systems and Automation Planning for a major regional bank
(now Wachovia) - I can assure you that banks do all their accounting in
decimal.

Investment analysis, manket and economic models, arbitrage analysis,
regression analysis, etc. are done in floating point.

They really know the difference and when it's important do use decimal v.
"binary"...

Lyle

On Wednesday 22 September 2004 20:47, Tom Jennings wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 19:08, William Donzelli wrote:
> > > There are SOME people (I am NOT one) who actually feel that
> > > DECIMAL is the right way to go in computers!
> >
> > If the computers are doing my bank statements, then yes, I am one of
> > them.
>
> I don't see this page as a need to 'return to decimal hardware' so much
> as people really need to consider accuracy and precision et al in
> arithemetic systems.
>
> These are turing-derived machines, after all, and can do decimal
> arithmetic when we want them to.

-- 
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
http://bickleywest.com
"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"
Received on Thu Sep 23 2004 - 00:12:28 BST

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