Great article overall!

@Chris & Tricia, If Tricia isn't old enough to remember the Intel FDIV situation, I certainly am. Luckily I didn't have to pursue any code tricks to get around it, but I'm sure some folks did.

Precision and significance in FP calculations has always been quite interesting. As noted in the article, that is why SAS is rarely, if ever used, in accounting apps. An interesting case I ran into back in 98/99 was with importing data from an IBM DB2 data base into SAS - a DB2 decimal field consisting of four digits in the form yy.mm, where the integer portion represented a year and the decimal portion a month. The mm portion contained a value between 01 and 12. For some reason, any value where the month was 03 (i.e. 98.03) would appear to be February, even when written using a format of 5.2. Now I know the IBM main frame FP standard is not the same as the IEEE standard, and I would have liked to have had the time to pursue the why of this phenomenom at the time, but I never could get round to it. I was able to correct the situation by simply using the ROUND function, to two decimal places, when reading the data. In this particular case, the numbers are not very large or very small, so the behaviour of the platform seemed odd, though I am aware that base 16 FP representation as on the IBM MF has its own unique set of precision issues as compared to a base 10 system like Intel. Maybe Chris or Bill can shed some light on what was happening?