From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 16:29:25 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Floating Point and Financial Software
Message-ID: <adca79db05021004e8bd@[205.199.118.202]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 11:40 PM 5/23/96, Paul S. Penrod wrote:

>But there is a simpler method to avoid the problem entirely. There is
>suffcient horsepower in uP's these days to support "long hand" division
>and multiplication. Granted it takes some extra grey matter to write the
>routines, but once done, you can vary the amount of precision to whatever
>you desire and not have to worry about accuracy.

I've been skipping most of the "floatingpointpunks" messags, but will note
that several languages I personally use (however infrequently) have
"bignum" support and support full-precision calculations. These include:
LISP and Scheme, Smalltalk, and Mathematica.

If performance is not an issue, the bignum packages available in C and C++
ought to be sufficient for any financial needs.

And Hal Finney is working on a bignum package for Java.

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
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