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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."
Int-like dataypes have hard limit of 2^32 or 64 or even more.
Eventually you simply want something bigger. And you also want to use somethign that can work well with XML schemans and several other systems. You simply have to use string as your other option is 32 bit int.
Also, String unlike Float does not loose precission. A lot slower, but precise.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
That's a bit naive of you. A better question is: why can't everyone do it the same way?
Ok, now that that the Americans have Obama in charge, I'm sure they'll be happy to convert to whatever you want in the name of kissing international ass. What the heck, they'll probably even pay for it. Maybe Obama can get another Nobel prize.