▲ | nine_k 5 days ago | |||||||
Only for physical measurements. For things like money, you should be pretty certain, often down to exact fractional cents. It appears that a similar approach is implemented in some modern Fortran libraries. | ||||||||
▲ | XorNot 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
Money has the problem that no matter how clever you are someone will punch all the values into Excel and then complain they don't match. Or specify they're paying X per day, but want hourly itemized billing...but it should definitely come out to X per day (this was one employer which meant I invoiced them with like 8 digits of precision due to how it divided, and they refused to accept a line item for mathematical uncertainty aggregates). | ||||||||
▲ | rictic 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
A person might have mistyped a price, a barcode may have been misread, the unit prices might be correct but the quantity could be mistaken. Modeling uncertainty well isn't just about measurement error from sensors. I wonder what it'd look like to propagate this kind of uncertainty around. You might want to check the user's input against a representative distribution to see if it's unusual and, depending on the cost of an error vs the friction of asking, double-check the input. | ||||||||
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▲ | geocar 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
> For things like money, you should be pretty certain, often down to exact fractional cents. That's one way to look at it. Another is that Money is certain only at the point of exchange. > It appears that a similar approach is implemented in some modern Fortran libraries. I'd be curious about that. Do you have a link? | ||||||||
▲ | random3 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
have you ever tried working computationally with money? Forget money, have you worked with floating points? There really isn't anything certain. | ||||||||
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