• D (unregistered)

    Had to write something pretty similar a while back... round to the nearest amount that could be paid in cash (e.g. 5c or 10c, depending on currency). And it might not have been the best way to do it, but it certainly didn't use hardcoded ranges in if blocks, and it certainly didn't use floating-point...

  • hakko (unregistered)

    double frist!

  • (nodebb)

    To round to nearest quarter, you can multiply by 4, round, then divide by 4. Yes it's bad code, but not hysterically funny bad code.

  • (nodebb)

    Using doubles for financial calculations is problematic on its own, because binary floating point cannot exactly represent decimal values.

  • Sally Flynn (unregistered)

    "You just know all the currency values all through this application are doubles."

    It's scary just how many systems do this. And it's doubly inexcusable in .NET, which has a decimal type specifically designed for currency values and other values that must be handled with fixed precision.

  • Future (unregistered)

    So, remind me again, why is everyone converting their financial code from COBOL (which has first-class decimal numbers) into Java or C#?

  • (nodebb) in reply to Mr. TA

    I will give a different result, if fractions of cents are used. 0.128 --> 0.00 in the original code 0.128 --> 0.25 in your solution

    The first case is probably correct! Rounding in financial systems does not always make sense.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Khudzlin

    That and when you have a high enough value in a floating point, you lose the least significant digits. Sure, losing track of a few meters when measuring the solar system is not such a big deal (unless it is time for an orbital insertion), but losing a few dollars out of a billion will mean that your trial balance will never actually balance ever again. VBA has the Currency type; .Net has the Decimal type. Both allow you to keep track of fractions of cents while still having billions of dollars/euros/pounds, etc. in full precision.

  • Vilx- (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    This. So much this.

  • Brian (unregistered) in reply to Nutster
    Nutster:
    VBA has the Currency type; .Net has the Decimal type. Both allow you to keep track of fractions of cents while still having billions of dollars/euros/pounds, etc. in full precision.

    Unfortunately, C++ doesn't have a built-in fixed-point type. So when you're the CTO of a fin-tech startup, and you decide to build your backend in C++ because that's what you know, who's got time to muck around with defining new types? We'll just go ahead and use doubles because we're not dealing with very big numbers anyway...

    Yes, this was one of my former employers.

  • (nodebb)

    Could this code be old enough to have started as C++? I don't recall C++ having a built-in decimal/money type 20 years ago. Although I'd use System.Decimal by default for money these days, maybe they don't deal in fractional cents or numbers high enough to shift the point.

    TRWTF is rounding to quarters. I had a part-time job where they rounded to nickels and thought that was stupid too.

    Also, the fix for this should include a date parameter to prevent corrupting old data with different calculations. Doubly recommending if you don't want to touch the code at all. Having to change anything else anywhere else sets off many PMs' "too risky!" alarm. Better to let the corruption trigger hundreds of tickets in the future, long after you've forgotten about the calculation change that caused it...

  • Chronomium (unregistered)

    The problem with using Decimals or whatever is that there's a fairly widespread understanding that they're "slow" compared to doubles.

    There's no corresponding widespread understanding of what exactly "slow" means, so you get a bunch of people saying "THEIR SLOW!!!1" without doing their own benchmarking on their own system, and thus they stick to doubles without seeing if they need to.

  • Gumpy_Gus (unregistered)

    I once worked for a large multinational company that stored and calculated their dollars using, I forget, 32 or maybe 64-bit reals. Nobody raised a fuss.

  • DQ (unregistered) in reply to Chronomium

    You mean: 'They're slow', right?

  • (nodebb) in reply to Nutster

    Luckily, doubles have better precision than cents on a billion (2^52 is about 4x10^15). So the problem that is most likely to come up is the inexact representation of decimal fractions.

  • Nav (unregistered)

    I'll bite. What is the right way to round to a quarter?

  • (nodebb)

    TRWTF is he started working for Initech. Didn't he read yesterday's story in which Initech announced it was shutting down?

  • (nodebb)

    Personally, I don't even worry about fixed point for currency.

    Currency always goes in an integer type, it is expressed in the smallest monetary units. (Thus it's not $1, but 100 cents.)

    Note that this isn't enough to avoid all problems. You have the contract price, accounting wants to split this into a base charge and use tax. The CFO goes ape when he finds "Use tax roundoff correction, $.01" in the details of a job. Sorry, there sometimes isn't a solution to the equation.

  • (nodebb)

    Rounding fractions incorrectly could be potentially very lucrative. I seem to remember a story about someone moving all the very tiny fractions to his own account. Only greed made him go on too long so he got caught.

    Come to think of it, isn't Office Space based on that and what was that company called again?

  • Gnasher729 (unregistered) in reply to Vilx-

    For an amount of a billion dollar, double precision rounding error is less than one in 320,000 cents. Double + knowing what you are doing beats decimal + clueless any time.

  • (nodebb) in reply to JiP

    Superman 3.

  • sizer99 (google) in reply to Future

    Because all the people who really know COBOL and want to do COBOL are dying. Incidentally, if you don't mind working on stupefyingly boring yet terrible legacy systems (which have no documentation) in COBOL, learning it would be a great way to guarantee well paid employment effectively forever.

    And C# has a built-in decimal type, so that's not a problem - at least if you actually use it. Java's got DecimalFormat but I've never used it so don't know if it works right for this application.

  • (nodebb) in reply to sizer99

    BigDecimal is an arbitrary precision integer and a scale (a power of 10). So yes, highly suitable for financial applications (and irrelevant for my work, which uses more transcendental functions than you can shake a stick at and so needs… more advanced techniques).

  • (nodebb) in reply to sizer99

    If it were well-paid, they'd have no problem finding people. They want H1Bs, though, so they're limited to what H1Bs have heard of and want to sell. Some organizations have been so hollowed out by offshoring that seven layers of management don't have any practical experience to the point you may as well consult a magic 8 ball.

    Senior VP: "Well, if you think we program that rocket in JavaScript, that's all I need to hear." Senior VP (aside): "What's JavaScript? What's programming? What's a rocket?"

  • Chronomium (unregistered) in reply to DQ

    Using the wrong "their" was part of the joke yes. You'll notice I did it correctly in the previous line.

  • Chronomium (unregistered) in reply to Nav

    I'll bite. What is the right way to round to a quarter?

    The first StackOverflow result I see for "round to fraction" uses the "multiply, round (or floor or etc), divide" method Mr. TA suggested above, which works for rounding to any fraction. I'd say there's not much better.

  • Ross Presser (google)

    As noted above, if fractional cents are in the input data, this will return some nonobvious results. Twelve and six tenths cents will be rounded down to zero. The "obvious" multiply-floor-divide method would round it up to one quarter.

    Which one is "right" is entirely up to the business, and I am sure there are businesses which will fight fiercely for either choice.

    Addendum 2019-04-30 15:59: EDIT: I meant "multiply-round-divide". "multiply-floor-divide" would be yet a third set of results.

  • snoofle (unregistered) in reply to Loren Pechtel

    You've obviously never worked in finance, where prices sometimes go to eight decimal places...

  • I dunno LOL ¯\(°_o)/¯ (unregistered)

    ToStr/string functions/ToInt32 is the new NEW math! Also, I hope none of their customers are big enough to be worth more than than $2B.

    I like that extra zero digit of precision, to make sure we're REALLY exact! Inaccurate floating point representation? What's that? This is double so it's super precise! At least those are the only four values of cents that have an exact floating point representation. I can't say so much for the other 96 values.

    To be fair, using double wouldn't be so bad if it represented a number in pennies. I don't think I want to see the string function that would need.

    Nav (unregistered) 2019-04-30

    I'll bite. What is the right way to round to a quarter?

    But quarters are already round, you silly person! Have you ever seen a square quarter?

    snoofle (unregistered) in reply to Loren Pechtel 2019-04-30

    You've obviously never worked in finance, where prices sometimes go to eight decimal places...

    Also, in the oil lease industry, ownership fractions are represented as a number between 0.0 and 1.0, with 8-10 digits after the decimal point. And that fraction likely has two or three digits * after * the decimal point. I'm sure that does fun things to the math that divides up royalties.

  • hung out to dry (unregistered) in reply to Khudzlin

    Doubles can exactly represent decimal values. You need to use at least one more bit than the fractional bit required by your decimal representation, and you need to understand what you are doing.

    Not too fine a point on it, if you have the idea that doubles can't exactly represent decimal values, then you are exactly the kind of person that should NOT use doubles to represent decimals, because you /think that/ you understand floating point numbers.

  • Chris (unregistered)

    At least doubles can exactly represent multiples of 0.25 (2^-2), up to a certain value.

  • Tinkle (unregistered) in reply to hung out to dry

    You can not represent 0.1 in binary, which is what doubles use. It works out 0.000110011 recurring, so you can not use one more bit then the infinite bits required.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Tinkle

    Actually you can as long as you know you will only ever have numbers with a certain maximum number of fraction digits. So, if you have a value in dollars and you know you will never have to deal with fractions of a cent, you simply store the number of cents (i.e. multiply the dollar value by 100). You can use a double to do that, but a 64 bit integer might be better.

    You still have to deal with rounding errors. For example, you have to know that dividing $1.01 between three people will leave you with a missing cent if you are not careful.

  • LaughingItOff (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    To whoever mentioned "multiply by 4, round, then divide by 4" method, you still have to deal with the flooring vs ceiling conundrum.

    The switch and case method is actually not totally bad at all. It is easy to understand and manageable. Sometimes that has more value than elegance.

  • LaughingItOff (unregistered) in reply to JiP

    It's also in Superman 3.

  • Think of it (unregistered)

    Just run 1*(.5-.4-.1) in Excel to see a nice rounding error.

    Using floats/doubles for calculation can fairly fast give errornous answers.

    Cobol and most system written in it has sorted out how rounding and calculations should be done. Interest rates are 3 decimals, exchange rates usually 5 decimals and rounding isn't really done because you just truncate the values.

    If you do deliberate rounding the amount is booked on a rounding account and keept track of.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Future

    A better question is, why doesn't Java still have an unlimited native integer type? (Of course I am nearly sure there are third party libraries to do that)

    Addendum 2019-05-07 01:42: Oops, I stand corrected. BigDecimal, apparently.

  • Mr. T (unregistered)

    Don't know if anyone mentioned this already, but I hope that input is never a negative value.

    RoundToQuarter(-1.99);

    Gives -1.00

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