Julia EvansApr 13, 2023

today I'm thinking about the "don't use floating point for money" advice I hear all the time. It obviously has a lot of truth to it.

But -- Excel/Google Sheets uses floating point for all of its calculations, people use spreadsheets for money calculations all the time, and it generally seems to work just fine -- the results get rounded for display.

So I'm trying to figure out if there's a more nuanced guideline than "never use floating point for money".

Show threadchrysn
@b0rk People use Excel for all kinds of things it's not good for – the renaming of the MARCH1 and SEPT1 genes is a testament to that.
If it's just for your own budgeting or a travel ledger, it's fine. But when being off by a cent means that the tax office will have a closer look at your books, you better do the calculations by the letter of the tax code, and "float" are not something I've ever seen in there.
Apr 13, 2023 at 5:49pmWeb
Show threadchrysnApr 13, 2023
@b0rk For precision and clarification: I'm not regularly dealing with the tax code, but conveniently the German term "Gleitkomma" is nowhere near as flexibly used as the English "float", and I didn't find it in any legal Austrian legal text except school curricula.