[development] Converting floats stored in scientific notation back to decimals

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting Karen Stevenson <karen at elderweb.com>:

>
> It sounds like this is going to get too complicated to do right now, 
> and no one is stepping up to do it, so I will probably just add a new 
> field type and rename the old one but do nothing about conversion.
>

I agree that providing another type with the old format is a good thing.

> I'm not sure about the idea of storing decimal data as integers 
> instead. That makes it more complicated since the data will need more 
> manipulation during input and display, while just adding a regular 
> decimal field as another option in the number module would be very 
> simple.
>

This is the only way to get real precision due to rounding issues 
especially for the financial institutions who need to track to 
fractions of the lowest money denomination.  I have a friend that spent 
three days trying to find a penny that came down to a rounding error 
because his data was fractional.  To implement it you just need to know 
what is the most significant fraction (MSF) and then multiply the input 
by MSF and for the display divide by the MSF as you've stated.

Earnie -- http://for-my-kids.com/
-- http://give-me-an-offer.com/