From: Kurt Vile <vile@burris.apdg.com>
Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 14:11:02 +0800
To: perry@piermont.com
Subject: Re: Floating Point and Financial Software
In-Reply-To: <199605221706.NAA23567@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <9605222358.AA08828@burris.apdg.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


per@oiemont.com writes:
>Again, I have seen floating point used for things like rates and in
>simulations. I have never seen it used for accounting. If you can
>name a system in which accounts were kept in floats I'd like to hear
>about it -- personally I'd be surprised. I've never seen such a thing.

I don't think its all that uncommon....

The Options Clearing Corporation does all of their clearing in 64  
bit floats, for one.
Most market making firms (read not a huge bank, clearing risk of  
less than say 50 mil) tend to do their accounting (both in house,  
and inventory (derivative instrument inventory) )in packages written  
in dos which mostly do 32 bit floats -
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

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....

Once you get down into the 10000th's of a us penny it really  
doesn't matter anymore...

--Kurt