Alan Gutierrez

Getting back to currency. The answer is simple. sprintf('%.2f', 10.8398274982734). Except it’s wrong.

That f in '%2f' is going to get you.

Whatever ActiveRecord says about currency, MySQL does not have a currency type. It does have a decimal type, however, and I’m not sure how well that maps to the ActiveRecord currency type, because currency is a sticky wicket.

You cannot use binary floating point numbers, like the kind you’ll use by default in most computer languages, because they are binary, and when you print the decimal representation, it is going to be off by a millismidge. You can assign a value to a floating point number, and ask for it right back, and find that is is off by a wee wee bit.

That is why there are decimal types that do the arithmetic we learned in grade school. They carry that one to the ten’s place, because to drop it is to short change a pensioner somewhere, and won’t that look bad. Every penny counts!

Actually, I don’t know how they implement arbitrary precision decimal types. Paul Christmann does, and he’ll tell us all about it in the comments.

Via Google, I find a very nice article on currency at CPAN in the documenation for Math::Currency, which is a Perl module, of course. The description section nails it.

There was a rambling discussion of why binary floats don’t work for currency in a thread on comp.lang.ruby called [Using Floats for Currency]. You can color on the screen with crayons while you read it.

That thread coughs up a Money class to play with.

The long and the short of it is, most database engines have a decimal type, they may call it currency, or they may call it decimial, or they may call it George, and they may hug it and squeeze it, but they are all very much not the same, so read the documentation for your particular database engine.

This advice repeated, in this article on OnLamp.com called SQL Data Types. Here’s a story about using the decimal type in MySQL that shows you how to use it through someone else’s trial and error.

At times, in my XSLT doodles, I’ve found myself without a decimal type, but with a need to tally currency.

The simplest way to do so, and to maintian precision, was to look at the amounts as a count of pennies. Here are some C programmers talking about the pennies trick. One dollar is represented as the integer 100. Credits, debits and summations turn out A-OK.

Becky has asked me something about currency in Ruby/Rails/ActiveRecord. I don’t know much about Rails/Ruby/ActiveRecord, but I was surpised to learn that Ruby programmers have no sense for collation. I was trying to explain to Becky that There Is More Than One Way To Do It, but I was wrong.

After showing here that she could sort by adding an rder => 'name' to the ActiveRecord::find method, I found that Ruby’s Array::sort had no way to do a proper collation. Thus, the only way that you could get your ‘a’ before your ‘B’ consistantly in Ruby would be to trust the underlying SQL engine. (Be warned, if you tell me to downcase or upcase you will be flamed.)

Squirt around the Internet looking for answers you’ll find none. Then to be malicious, I ran the search for ruby collation with a minor tweak that produced tons of intelligent responses. In Ruby land, collation is no.

Strange that this language from Japan has little support for i18n and l10n. What gives? Ruby obvously has support for Kanji, but none for Unicode. Is it not that important?

Rebecca Houtman is learning how to program with Ruby on Rails. We did Part I of rolling on rails last night.

JazzFest is approaching. I’ll be volunteering at the WWOZ tent, watching over some computers for Christian Kuffner.

French Quarter Fest has passed. Caught the second day. Listened to Wynton Marsallis debut “Congo Square” in Congo Square, Armstrong Park. The sun was hot. The music was brassy. We listened from the edges in the shade. Saw many Mid-City people.

On the way back to my place, Rebecca Houtman and I stopped into the Farrington Smith Gallery, where Adam Farrington and Scott Smith were lounging about.

At some point in the lazy conversation, Adam lights up, as he will, and announces that he made a chair bike. He returns from the courtyard with a bicycle that has a chair attached to the frame before the handlebars. He offers me a ride on the bike as he blusters past and out the door, such was his confidence that I would accept.

And sure enough, the rolls reversed on Chartres. I piloted the chair bike, and it is quite managable. The weight is attached to the frame and sprung. Zero injuries.

Over our late dinner at Coop’s, Becky and I are talking about some of the latest world events, and I suggest we teach the Arab nations a lesson and boycott Arabic numerals.

We’d go back to Roman numerals, but instead of X, V and I, we’d use patrotic symbols.

Freedom Numerals! Becky says.

Then we talk about the different symbols, an eagle and two Statues of Liberty is seven.

Then it occurs to me, no, we just use our presidents. A Lincoln and two Washingtons, that’s seven. Jackson is twenty. Grant is fifty. Benji’s a hundred.

Who’s on the ten, I ask? She says it’s the handsome one. Handsome? President? Who? She struggles for a bit. Hamilton she says.

Wow. It never occured to me that any of the founding fathers was a looker. I go ask Adam to give me two tens for a twenty.

Hamilton is one dashing fellow.