Re: Problems with large records (GNAT) [continued]

[tmoran@acm.org]

>a lot of splits and dividends in their history have very
>small prices back in the '70s.
>...
>With volume, I think that really needs to better than 32 bit range.
>Once you start to calculate weekly or monthly volumes, quite a number
>...
>Fixed point for this wide ranging data doesn't give me the confidence
>I want from a (mission critical) financial application.

  Of course we were in a "minimize storage" mode for speed and
because customers downloaded the data over 14,400 baud modems.  So
internal computation could use large, or even floating point,
variables, but stored data was as compact as possible.  For instance,
the original prices were stored in 16 bits scaled, but were
converted, then multiplied by a "split factor", for computation.
Similarly for aggregated volumes.  Many customers did very trivial
arithmetic, but would be unhappy over rounding errors, so float
(especially for commodities with non power-of-two scale factors)
was undesirable for the raw data.