Re: best CL type for fixed decimal values

Subject: Re: best CL type for fixed decimal values
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 2000/03/03
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3161081269457609@naggum.no>

* Marc Battyani
| What CL types are best suited for computing with fixed decimal values with
| exactly n places after the decimal point?
| 
| I can use
|     floats with a special rounding after each operation

* Johan Kullstam <kullstam@ne.mediaone.net>
| floats are out since finite length decimal point numbers often have
| non-finite binary expansions.  0.1 for example cannot be represented
| exactly by floating point.

  but if he knows he has N places after the decimal point, that translates
  directly to a factor (expt 10 N), which means he could do well with the
  extra precision and speed of a double-float value relative to bignums.

#:Erik