
Floating point attitudes: blissful ignorance and fear - rbanffy
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2016/09/06/floating-point-between-blissful-ignorance-and-fear/
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Most conventions come from the days when computers were mostly used for
scientific and military applications. But now we do more currency-oriented
calculations, the kind that used to be left to COBOL, which generally doesn't
use floating point.

A newer approach is the "Decimal" type (name depends on system, I'm assuming
Microsoft here). It's still floating point, but shrinks the exponent
range/size and uses the freed bits for more decimal precision. Poor for
computing the universe, but better at money. It's still not a perfect
solution, but greatly reduces the chance of problems.

One should still be careful when computing with large amounts of money and/or
lots of fractional rates.

