From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2006-11-21T10:07:07+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby vs Java vs c++ Charles D Hixson wrote: > I stopped using VBA after I caught it making arithmetic mistakes. Not > rounding errors, outright mistakes. Now granted this was over 5 years > ago now, and they MAY have improved things...but I wouldn't trust it > any more. I actually rewrote things to use Excel macros to avoid > doing arithmetic in VBA. I never did figure out under what > circumstances it would do this, but ever since then I've had an > extreme distrust of everything programmed in MSOffice. I figure that > Excel macros are probably safe...because there would be so many eyes > looking at them. But I'm not sure. I never heard anyone else saying > that they had caught VBA (actually basic for MSAccess2000) in an > arithmetic error, but I definitely did. The numbers were small enough > that a third grader would have seen the error, and there wasn't > ANYTHING subtle about the program. Excel itself has a long and painful history of mathematical incorrectness. To be fair, some of it came from the need to be upward compatible from Lotus 1-2-3, which in turn needed to be upward compatible from VisiCalc. A simple example is the belief in Excel that 1900 was a leap year. I'm not sure what Google query you can use to hunt down this stuff, but I would not make business decisions based on anything done with Excel. I use it as an X-Y plotter when I'm in a hurry, but when I actually care about the numbers, I do things in R. -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P) http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/ If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.