Re: evolution of arithmetic, was bytes, The joy of FORTRAN

On Wed, 5 Mar 2025 03:00:44 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

sometimes it's something like the the nearest 1/100 of a percent which
would be four digits after the decimal point.

But percentages typically do not go into the millions, do they. The term
for those hundredths of a percent is “basis points”. So for example if the
OCR is set by the Reserve Bank at 5.75%, then arithmetic involves
multiplication/division by a factor like 1.0575, which should be doable
quite accurately for many common money amounts within 15 figures.