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.

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

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.