Sure. This was the early eighties; we didn't really have "libraries", and even if we had, there was no way to plug them into this proprietary development system.
> library like mpfr suited for financial applications, a fixed precision “Decimal” type that’s better suited for financial applications
I don't know mpfr, but my guess is you meant to say that mpfr is better-suited for scientific applications?
Yeah, arbitrary precision is different from fixed point precision that financial institutions typically need. MPFR is arbitrary precision so if you’re doing stuff involving our solar system and beyond, you probably want to use mpfr and be very careful in setting up the equations you’re using. Financial transactions have different requirements though and the arbitrary precision is unnecessarily slow, uses unnecessary amounts of RAM, and I believe will probably difficult to configure correctly. That being said, I’ve never really used mpfr. More just relaying what I understand to be the lay of the land.
Unfortunately, if your formula are ill conditioned you can get inaccurate results even using thousands of bits of precision... so there is no replacement for doing analysis and testing.
Perhaps if there were some interval-math equivalent of MPFR you could at least tell when your code might be producing wrong results without extensive mathematical analysis.
> library like mpfr suited for financial applications, a fixed precision “Decimal” type that’s better suited for financial applications
I don't know mpfr, but my guess is you meant to say that mpfr is better-suited for scientific applications?