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".
@nelson @b0rk It depends on what you're doing. My father was an accountant for the phone company, and he'd worry about being pennies off in a billion-dollar figure. Errors of that size accumulate quickly with floating point. It's a problem (probably not a big one, but that's what accountants do) if it shows up on a corporate tax document. It's all about precision.
OTOH, if you're doing a sales projection, your audience really only cares about two (maybe three) significant digits.
@Emily_S @mikeloukides @nelson @b0rk hold it... wasn't that how Richard Pryor's character got rich in Superman 3?
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