[Info-vax] New VSI Roadmap (yipee!)

[John Reagan]

On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at 10:07:10 AM UTC-5, David Froble wrote:

> As for those worrying about absolute precision with currency, when the 
> CEO of a distribution company wants to see the monthly bookings and 
> billings, he may want to see it rounded to thousands, and most 
> definitely not pennys.

But I suspect the accountants or the class-action lawyers will care.

> 
> All I did was two things, first mentioned that we have been very 
> successful in using FP for currency, and second asked for a rounding 
> function as part of a language.
> 

Since you've done this for a long time, you've went from VAX to Alpha in the that timeframe.  Did the switch from D to G (which drops 3 bits of mantissa) make a difference?

If you want to count pennies, use X_float.  You get 33 digits of pennies.  Using X_float to count integral things is fine.  You have to provide your own scaling of course.

Back to the rounding function, I can see why YOU want such a thing given the routine call overhead in BASIC, but lets see if we can fix the routine call overhead issue instead of adding builtin after builtin after builtin.  Maybe some keyword on the subroutine or such?