Thanks for teaching me something, but the obscurity of your answer just illustrates how rare that requirement is in human readable formats, and mostly limited to data formats designed for numeric precision, like HDF5, FITS or protobuf.
I don’t think having well-defined precision is a rare requirement, it’s more that most devs don’t understand (and/or care) about the pitfalls of inaccuracy, because they usually aren’t obvious. Also, languages like JavaScript/PHP make it hard to do things the right way. When I was working on an old PHP codebase, I ran into a popular currency library (Zend_Currency) that used floats for handling money, which I’m sure works fine up until the point the accountants call you up asking why they can’t balance the books. The “right way” was to use the bcmath extension, which was a huge pain.
Thanks for teaching me something, but the obscurity of your answer just illustrates how rare that requirement is in human readable formats, and mostly limited to data formats designed for numeric precision, like HDF5, FITS or protobuf.
I don’t think having well-defined precision is a rare requirement, it’s more that most devs don’t understand (and/or care) about the pitfalls of inaccuracy, because they usually aren’t obvious. Also, languages like JavaScript/PHP make it hard to do things the right way. When I was working on an old PHP codebase, I ran into a popular currency library (Zend_Currency) that used floats for handling money, which I’m sure works fine up until the point the accountants call you up asking why they can’t balance the books. The “right way” was to use the bcmath extension, which was a huge pain.