From: oinkoink+unet@... (Bret Jolly)
Date: 2003-06-26T06:47:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Decimal builtin?

Holden Glova <dsafari@paradise.net.nz> wrote in message news:<200306242007.59017.dsafari@paradise.net.nz>...

> I am curious what people use to represent decimals when with no rounding 
> error? I have a need for this and have come up against a brick wall. I was 
> hoping for something that was similar to BigDecimal in Java - does Ruby have 
> anything like this?

   Shigeo Kobayashi's BigFloat module (and also its successor BigDecimal)
does arbitrary-precision arithmetic, and does it internally in decimal, so 
you avoid the "penny math" errors from converting decimal to binary. 
It's useful, though a bit short on advanced functionality (I had
to write my own logarithm method).  You can get the BigFloat from
the RAA (http://raa.ruby-lang.org/) and I think BigDecimal is still 
sitting somewhere in the Ruby development CVs.

                             Regards, Bret