How was non-decimal money represented in software?

Posted by dan04 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by dan04
Published on 2010-06-13T06:02:57Z Indexed on 2010/06/13 6:12 UTC
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A lot of the answers to the questions about the accuracy of float and double recommend the use of decimal for monetary amounts. This works because today all currencies are decimal except MGA and MRO, and those have subunits of 1/5 so are still decimal-friendly.

But what about the software used in U.S. stock markets when prices were in 1/16ths of dollar? The accuracy of binary data types wouldn't have been an issue, right?

Going further back, how did pre-1971 British accounting software deal with pounds, shillings, and pence? Did their versions of COBOL have a special PIC clause for it? Were all amounts stored in pence? How was decimalisation handled?

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