Moving Decimal Bug Loses Money

mario.m7 writes "Poste Italiane, the Italian postal service, suffered yesterday from an abnormal computation in ATM and credit card operations, since the decimal comma was not taken into account. The whole sum was therefore multiplied by 100, resulting in a 115,00 Euro transaction being debited as 11.500 Euro! Thousands of accounts are deep in the red and locked (link pumped through translator), so that no more operations are possible. Poste Italiane is gradually recovering the problem, fixing the error and re-crediting the sum debited in excess. Consumer associations have offered support to clients in case this lasts longer and causes damage."

Comments

You mean 11,500 Euro

[Chrisq]

You mean 11,500 Euro as 11.500 Euro.

Re:You mean 11,500 Euro

[mea37]

You're letting the punctuation confuse you. The computer doesn't use punctuation to represent the number.

The error was essentially that a number of Euro cents was interpreted as a number of Euro.

So if someone entered 11500 euro cents (115.00 Euro using American punctuation, 115,00 using European punctuation - which seems fair since we're counting Euros), and the display showed them that this is what they had entered, but the computer interpreted it as 11500 euros (11,500 using American punctuation, 11.500 using European). Just as TFS says.

"without _moving_ the seperator (or omitting it completely)" ... which is exactly what the summary says happened. Hell, did you even read the headline?

Re:You mean 11,500 Euro

[ivucica]

Whoops. Wrong key pressed. Thanks.

Re:For the most part.

[sopssa]

This is the same in my bank, if you type in . it gives an error. In addition it requires you to type in the ,00 too, and next to the sum text box is an example like "150,00".

Having comma/decimal as a separator is stupid anyway, space does just fine - 150 000.35

Re:Not helping!

[emm-tee]

...it's worth clarifying whether they're using the decimal or comma convention in the summary itself!

Yep the submitter got it wrong. Given that he is posting in English, to an American website, it makes no sense to use the comma as the decimal separator and the period as the thousands separator (unless the idea was to intentionally cause confusion to prove the point).

With a few exceptions (e.g. South Africa), the rule of thumb seems to be that if you're using English, you use "." as the decimal separator.

Wikipedia has a very long article on these things http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator, but most interesting is the diagram showing which countries use which. I found it surprising how many use "," as the decimal point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DecimalSeparator.png

Re:God Bless the USA!

[Duradin]

Look at what those numbers are divisible by:
12 can be divided evenly by 2,3,4 or 6.
36 can be divided evenly by 2,3,4,6,9,12,18.
5280 can be divided evenly by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 20, 22, 24, 30, 32, 33, 40, 44, 48, 55, 60, 66, 80, 88, 96, 110, 120, 132, 160, 165, 176, 220, 240, 264, 330, 352, 440, 480, 528, 660, 880, 1056, 1320, 1760, 2640. The important ones being 2,3,4,5,6,8,10.

Plus metric measurements are generally too small (cm) or too big (m) to be practical for day to day uses.

So if you look at it from a pencil and paper math era perspective having the nice fractions was a plus. (
It's why we (thankfully) don't have metric time. 60 is divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30. 100 is only divisible by 2,5,10,20,25, and 50. The Babylonians were onto something.)

Re:Periods and commas.

[Fzz]

I await the US and Britain's change to the 'universal' standard with interest.

Um, maybe look again. Most of Asia including India, China and Japan uses a decimal point rather than a decimal comma. If you want a popularity contest, dot wins.

But it's not really about popularity is it? If the accompanying text is English, it should be a dot. If the accompanying text is French it should be a comma. Unless you're Canadian, in which case you're probably just confused.

Does your software work in Turkey?

[Nyrath the nearly wi]

This is just one of the many pitfalls when trying to localize your software.

Does Your Code Pass The Turkey Test?

Re:God Bless the USA!

[Daimanta]

"Plus metric measurements are generally too small (cm) or too big (m) to be practical for day to day uses."

Furthermore imperial measurements are generally too large (inch) or too small (yard) to be practical for day to day users. The fact that the mile exists also creates confusion because every old nations used to have it's own "mile" which either a lot bigger or a lot smaller than the English "mile".

Also multiplication by a number that is not equal to the numberbase(10) is annoying to use.

Out of the top of my head

1000mm=100cm=100dm=1m=0,1Dm=0,01hm=0,001km=0,000001Mm

Try to do that with the imperial system which randomly swaps between 6,2,12 and whatever they feel like.

Re:God Bless the USA!

[wastedlife]

Plus metric measurements are generally too small (cm) or too big (m) to be practical for day to day uses.

Excellent point. It is too bad that there is no measurement between the two. Hmm, maybe we should email the SI about this? It could be 1/10th of a meter, and how about "deci" (to indicate 10) as the prefix? I think it might solve the problem!