64-bit bank balances ‘ought to be enough for anybody’?
Specialising in financial software, over the past 2 decades I have been fighting over this with countless people, teams and companies.<p>For accounting you should only ever use arbitrary precision math library with ability to specify rounding rules. If your programming environment/language does not have one, it is unsuitable to be used for accounting, billing, invoicing, payments, etc.<p>Having the underlying library is, of course, not enough. You also need to be able to properly store (data structures, databases), transfer (wire formats, data structures), process (order of operations, rounding rules), present (UI toolkit) and so on.<p>I have never in my life joined a software project for any organisation that was able to do basic arithmetic on money correctly (and I worked for companies ranging from small startups just needing invoices and very simple billing to risk management departments for largest financial institutions on Earth processing trillions of dollars on a daily basis).