From: Charles Mills <cmills@...>
Date: 2006-03-31T09:33:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Marshaling Decimal types from .NET

John Lam wrote:
> Decimal numbers in .NET are 128 bit values that avoid the rounding errors
> that can arise from floating point calcs:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/csspec/html/vclrfcsharpspec_4_1_7.asp
>
> My question is: when marshaling a .NET decimal type to Ruby, what should I
> do? Should I marshal it to a bigdecimal?
>
> Thanks
> -John
> http://www.iunknown.com
>
> ------=_Part_9810_19207910.1143749376557--

I would say yes.  I expect you would have something like the following:
C#          Ruby
----        ----
float       Float
double      Float
decimal     BigDecimal

I imagine when a C# programmer uses decimal, they choose it instead of
double for a reason, making a conversion from decimal to Float (double)
all the more likely to cause rounding error.

-Charlie