> It's actually in use in many places, for things like handling currency and money
Hm, are you sure? I don't believe "rational" types which encode numbers as a numerator and denominator are typically used for currency/money.
If they were, would the denominator always be 100 or 1000? I guess you could use a rational type that way, although it'd be a small subset of what rational data types are intended for. But I guess it'd be "safe"? Not totally sure actually, one question would be if rounding works how you want when you do things like apply an interest percentage to a monetary amount. (I am not very familiar with rational data types, and am not sure how rounding works -- or even if they do rounding at all, or just keep increasing the magnitude of the denominator for exact precision, which is probably _not_ what you'd want with currency, for reasons not only of performance but of desired semantics).
You are correct an IEEE-754 floating point type is inappropriate for currency. I believe for currency you would generally use a fixed-point type (rather than floating point type), or non-IEEE "arbitrary precision floating point" type like ruby's BigDecimal (ruby also offers a Rational type. https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.0/Rational.html . This is a different thing than the arbitrary-precision BigDecimal. I have never used Rational or seen it used. It is not generally used for money/currency.) Or maybe even a binary-coded decimal value? (Not sure if that's the same thing as "arbitrary-precision floating point" of ruby's BigDecimal or not).
There are several possible correct and appropriate data encodings/types for currency, that will have the desired precision and calculation semantics... I am not sure if rational data type is one of them, and I don't believe it is common (and it would probably be much less performant than the options taht are common). Postgres, for instance, does not have a "rational" type built in, although there appears to be a third-party extension for it. Yet postgres is obviously frequently used to store currency values! I believe many other popular rdbms have no rational data type support at all.
I'm not actually sure what domains rational data types are good for. Probably not really anything scientific measurement based either (the IEEE-754 floating point types ARE usually good for that, that is their use case!) The wikipedia page sort of hand-wavily says "algebraic computation", which I'm not enough about math to really know what that means. I have never myself used rational data types, I don't think! Although I was aware of them; they are neat.
Good catch! I'm thinking of fixed-point number types. Ruby's Rational was/is cool, but looks like an inherently difficult number-type to work with and keep sanity high.
For currency, business side should decide the rules (* 100 or * 1000000), and where to funnel the pennies ;) Fixed-point has it's own sort of gotchas, ie. multiplication, power, division, sqrt, etc. So there are fancy techniques to work with the numbers, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham%27s_line_algorithm
When you start looking into all of this, it's interesting to see how many ways there are to represent numbers in a computer. It isn't actually obvious or trivial at all, there is no one "true" or "accurate" representation, and they all had to be invented by past computer scientists!
If you're not a bank or similar but just dealing with currency to buy and sell things like for ecommerce, the default semantics of a fixed point type (like postgres 'money' type) or "arbitrary precision floating point" type like ruby's BigDecimal or are probably good enough, and just fine in a way that IEEE-754 floating point definitely are NOT. And probably don't require any additional business side decisions or involve any significant gotchas. Just using them instead of IEEE-754 floating point and not thinking too hard after that is probably just fine.
If you ARE a bank or something similar -- I wouldn't know, I haven't done that! A relevant question: Am I concerned with specifying exactly how fractional pennies get rounded?
Ask the COBOL guys and gals for the true answer ;)
There are accounting, balancing, laws, regulations and reconciliation issues where for the really serious stuff, you use whatever fit spec and requirements, not the other way around. Ruby's BigDecimal will be fine, if you implement the detailed specification about how to calculate each operation every step of the way, with designated precision at various steps, together with truncations along the way that may not make much sense to the developer (or anyone else, but are required to get correct numbers).
Point is, sometimes other parties need to be able to replicate the exact numbers, unrelated to any internal library or coding standards. Code using just plain integers could be easier to certify than a library dependency.
In such cases, you don't just round to make numbers prettier, but may even keep the truncated part of the equation. It's then nice to use simple stuff that are proven to work and not change over time.
Have you worked on ecommerce where you've been given such detailed specs? I have worked on ecommerce, I never have been.
I don't even understand exactly what you mean by "implementing detailed specifications about how to calculate each operation every step of the way" with ruby BigDecimal. Can you provide an example? Ordinarily, you just use ruby `+` and `*` etc operators with BigDecimal values. (Or SQL/postgres arithmetic operators with postgres money type). I don't even know what a "specification about how to calculate each operation every step of the way" would look like. This is something you've had to do with basic ecommerce apps?
I'm not sure what solution you are suggesting could be characterized as "simple stuff that are proven to work and not change over time"
Seriously, most everyone just uses something like BigDecimal or postgres Money type, and it's fine. (IEEE-754 float is NOT though. Neither, probably, is the rational type that you initially suggested... )
>If they were, would the denominator always be 100 or 1000?
The numerator and denominator get automatically reduced to lowest terms (just like you learned in elementary school, so 15/100 becomes 3/20) internally by every implementation I know of. This comes at a performance cost for every operation, but it helps keeping the numerator and denominator from blowing up.
>not sure how rounding works -- or even if they do rounding at all
They do not. The point of a Rational type is to keep precise values, so it's up to the programmer to decide when and how values are rounded.
>"arbitrary precision floating point" type like ruby's BigDecimal
Not sure how Ruby implements BigDecimal, but Java internally represents it as an BigInteger of digits, and a second integer that represents where in the number the decimal point should go. This means that BigDecimal still can't truly represent a value such as 1/3, since you can't have an infinite amount of 3's, but a Rational can.
>I'm not actually sure what domains rational data types are good for.
I'll be honest and say I've never had to use them either, but it's nice to know they exist. The intended use case is when you need to perform calculations and maintain as much precision and accuracy as possible in the intermediate values and such accuracy is more important than speed.
Hm, are you sure? I don't believe "rational" types which encode numbers as a numerator and denominator are typically used for currency/money.
If they were, would the denominator always be 100 or 1000? I guess you could use a rational type that way, although it'd be a small subset of what rational data types are intended for. But I guess it'd be "safe"? Not totally sure actually, one question would be if rounding works how you want when you do things like apply an interest percentage to a monetary amount. (I am not very familiar with rational data types, and am not sure how rounding works -- or even if they do rounding at all, or just keep increasing the magnitude of the denominator for exact precision, which is probably _not_ what you'd want with currency, for reasons not only of performance but of desired semantics).
You are correct an IEEE-754 floating point type is inappropriate for currency. I believe for currency you would generally use a fixed-point type (rather than floating point type), or non-IEEE "arbitrary precision floating point" type like ruby's BigDecimal (ruby also offers a Rational type. https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.5.0/Rational.html . This is a different thing than the arbitrary-precision BigDecimal. I have never used Rational or seen it used. It is not generally used for money/currency.) Or maybe even a binary-coded decimal value? (Not sure if that's the same thing as "arbitrary-precision floating point" of ruby's BigDecimal or not).
There are several possible correct and appropriate data encodings/types for currency, that will have the desired precision and calculation semantics... I am not sure if rational data type is one of them, and I don't believe it is common (and it would probably be much less performant than the options taht are common). Postgres, for instance, does not have a "rational" type built in, although there appears to be a third-party extension for it. Yet postgres is obviously frequently used to store currency values! I believe many other popular rdbms have no rational data type support at all.
I'm not actually sure what domains rational data types are good for. Probably not really anything scientific measurement based either (the IEEE-754 floating point types ARE usually good for that, that is their use case!) The wikipedia page sort of hand-wavily says "algebraic computation", which I'm not enough about math to really know what that means. I have never myself used rational data types, I don't think! Although I was aware of them; they are neat.