I know this is a humor subreddit and this is a joke, but this problem wasted a huge week of mine since I was dealing with absurdly small numbers in my simulations. Use fsum from math library in Python to solve this people.
One of my lecturers mentioned a way they would get around this was to store all values as ints and then append a . two character before the final one.
Yeah, this works especially well for currencies (effectively doing all calculations in cents/pennies), as you do need perfect precision throughout the calculations, but the final results gets rounded to two-digit-precision anyways.
quite a horrible hack, most modern languages have decimal type that handles floating rounding. And if not, you should just use rounding functions to two digits with currency.
Had to think about it, but yeah, I guess, you can’t do division or non-integer multiplication with integer cents, as standard integer math always rounds downwards and it forces you to round after every step.
You could convert to a float for the division/multiplication and you do get more efficient addition/subtraction as well as simpler de-/serialization, but in most situations, it’s probably less trouble to use decimals.
