Is 23,148,855,308,184,500 a magic number, or sheer chance?

Posted by Roddy on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Roddy
Published on 2009-07-15T19:51:08Z Indexed on 2010/04/15 2:23 UTC
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magic-numbers

News reports such as this one indicate that the above number may have arisen as a programming bug.

A man in the United States popped out to his local petrol station to buy a pack of cigarettes - only to find his card charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.

That is $23 quadrillion (£14 quadrillion) - many times the US national debt.*

In hex it's $523DC2E199EBB4 which doesn't appear terribly interesting at first sight.

Anyone have any thoughts about what programming error would have caused this?

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