Also if you don’t know what a float is (because you’re not a programmer or have only worked with very high level languages that try to conceal these details) then my horror makes no sense so I will break it down for you

If you declare a number value to be a float, that is telling the computer two things:

• first, that the value is allowed to be fractional and not just whole numbers (integers). This means that if someone reports that the fleet gained 2.3 planes or lost 0.01 planes, the computer would be like yeah, sure, that makes sense, let me write that down.

• second, doing math with fractions is much more computationally complicated than whole numbers. Telling the computer a value is a “float” is explicitly telling it that you want it to use the fastest methods it has available to do the math, even if they’re not 100% accurate down to the smallest fraction of a fraction. You are saying it’s okay to lose track of a hundredth of a plane here or there as long as you count the planes really fast.

The intended use of floats is things like video game graphics: you can’t tell if the height of the enemy is 6.200002 meters or 6.2 meters exactly, and letting the computer not worry about the difference makes the calculations much faster. You should never, ever use floats for things like money, because over the course of many successive adds and subtracts, entire cents or dimes will just pop in and out of existence. Or, like, some unspecified fraction of a plane, which is probably not what you want.

@0xabad1dea

But now it makes sense. Number of planes can go from 1.0 to 0.99 in flight.

@0xabad1dea I worked at a large investment bank years ago where all currencies were stored as floats EXCEPT GBP which was store as Ints in pence. (Yes, even Yen that has no fractional value).

Of course, on occasion, some programmer would forget to * or / by 100 to get GBP and all hell would break loose 😂

It rhymed with Reddit and a European Alpine country with a square flag who DID go bust 😂