this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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IEEE 754 (cdn.fosstodon.org)
submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24332731

~~Stolen~~ Cross-posted from here: https://fosstodon.org/@foo/113731569632505985

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Instead of representing $1.102 as 1.102 your store it as 1012 (or whatever precision you need) and divide by 1000 only for displaying it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (2 children)

So if you handle different precisions you also need to store the precision/exponent explicitly for every value. Or would you sanitise this at input and throw an exception if someone wants more precision than the program is made for?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It depends on the requirements of your app and what programming language you use. Sometimes you can get away with using a fixed precision that you can assume everywhere, but most common programming languages will have some implementation of a decimal type with variable precision if needed, so you won't need to implement it on your own outside of university exercises.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Okay thank you. I was wondering because for stuff like buying electricity, gas or certain resources, parts etc. there is prices with higher precision in cents, but the precision would not be identical over all use cases in a large company.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

No exponent, or at least a common fixed exponent. The technique is called "fixed point" as opposed to "floating point". The rationale is always to have a known level of precision.