Comment by phoehne

For example 16.10 is not exactly 16.10 in IEEE floating point. When you do enough operations, and depending on the order of operations, you can wind up several cents off. That sounds small, but can be enough to give your auditors heart-burn. COBOL does BCD arithmetic, (not really but at least conceptually), and it's penny accurate to 31 digits (as per the standard - implementations may have greater accuracy). Frankly, it's stupid that 63 years after COBOL we're still treating money and currency as an afterthought in languages that are supposed to be business oriented. Proper currency handling should be part of the language.