SPUG: Working with currency

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Apr 02, 2009, Michael R. Wolf wrote:
>
> On Apr 2, 2009, at 8:46 PM, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes wrote:
>
>> The only pre-existing solution that's going to work consistently is:
>>
>> Store and manipulate in pennies; only use dollars on user input and  
>> output.
>> No modules required. :)
>
>
> A module-less solution was my first choice.  It's elegant (for the  
> "small and simple" definition of elegant).
>
> After an hour of digging, I can't find indications (much less an answer) 
> on when it's necessary to 'use bigint'.  In other words, what is the 
> moral equivalent of MAXINT, or at least a close approximation  
> (disregarding whatever legal fine-print exists) for a back of the  
> envelope proof-of-concept design?

That depends on the underlying hardware and the integer length.
Normal longs will handle things most small-to-medium businesses
normally deal with (until Hyperinflation hits which is coming RSN
to a neighborhood near you).  Dollar amounts are stored
internally as cents.  Addition and subtraction is a no-brainer,
but multiplication and division is a bit messier as one needs to
normalize to cents with appropriate rounding rules.

It would be in interesting exercise in OO programming and
overriding operators to create a class that would handle fixed
point decimal numbers properly.  I did something like this
several years ago in perl, but generally find dealing with
bigints to be pretty ugly.

Bill
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