Sunday 26 January 2014

Semantics Rant

Worthy of The Daily WTF, and a common occurence when machine types are mixed up with the everyday "types" of things.

Telephone numbers are NOT integers, and money amounts are NOT floating point numbers
Even though the machine types look like these an examination of the ITU-T E.123 document will more than convince that telephone numbers are not integers (or more specifically long unsigned integers). Further proof is that the mathematics operations of addition, subtraction are not defined. Indeed the only operation is equality between two numbers, plus a few other operations to extract different parts, eg: area code, country code etc.

Money amounts similarly: floating point numbers or even decimals have very different properties to the representation and storage of money amounts. In particular the problem of rounding (see also Superman 3 for a humorous take on this). What makes this worse is that support is varying, for example in SQL there are Currency and Money types but these are not supported across all RDBMs, or not provided at all. As Martin Fowler has pointed out, in object-oriented languages this is easily rectified with the provision of a class for money and himself provides the pattern.

Now I feel better...

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