From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2004-10-31T04:11:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Money Class (was Re: Rounding error, (100.0 * 9.95).to_i == 994)

Well, it depends on what you're measuring. Some tasks need a finer 
resolution than others. One example: A few years ago, one of the major 
U.S. stock exhanges (NASDAQ, I think) went to a lot of trouble to 
convert from expressing stock prices in fractions to expressing them in 
pennies. Those prices used to be expressed as, for example, $16 3/4 or 
$16 3/8 (down to 1/8 or 1/16, I think), now they're expressed as $16.75 
or $16.33. (I don't think it goes finer than one cent.) This didn't 
used to be a big deal, but there have been a lot of advances in trading 
strategies and software that make it important now. If you have trading 
instruments like options and futures to use, and you think the market 
has valued a certain stock 2 cents too high or too low, you can make 
that bet and clear a lot of money in one day.

On the other hand, all those traders living in New York don't think an 
individual penny means anything. If they were late from work and saw a 
penny on the street, they probably won't stop to pick it up. So 
basically it depends on what you're measuring the money for in the 
first place.

On Oct 30, 2004, at 2:46 PM, Carl Youngblood wrote:

> Come to think of it, do all currencies even have "cents"?  I know of
> some countries where the currency is so devalued that nobody uses
> fractionary amounts.
>