From: oinkoink+unet@... (Bret Jolly)
Date: 2004-05-20T15:08:49+09:00
Subject: Re: bad maths

A small addendum to my previous answer.  If you need exact decimal
arithmetic (as you do if the decimals represent dollars and cents)
you should use the BigDecimal class.  That works in base 10 rather
than base 2. (Actually, it works in base 10000, which is mathematically
equivalent to base 10.)  Imitating your example:
require 'bigdecimal'
a = BigDecimal("5.5", 20) # the 20 indicates the precision
5.times {puts (a += BigDecimal("0.1")).to_s}
# output follows:
0.56E1
0.57E1
0.58E1
0.59E1
0.6E1

No nonsense about 5.99999... here.

The BigDecimal class is useful when you want the arithmetic to
be decimal rather than binary, and especially when you need extra
precision beyond what floating-point can achieve.  It is, however,
slower than floating point, a bit trickier to use (since you have
to set precision or make sure the implicit settings are acceptable)
and its method library is less rich than what the Math module
provides for Float.

Regards, Bret