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What class should I use for representation of money to avoid most rounding errors?
Should I use Decimal, or a simple built-in number?
Is there any existing Money class with support for currency conversion that I could use?
Any pitfalls that I should avoid?
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The best datatype to use for currency in C# is decimal. The decimal type is a 128-bit data type suitable for financial and monetary calculations. The decimal type can represent values ranging from 1.0 * 10^-28 to approximately 7.9 * 10^28 with 28-29 significant digits.
1 Answer. Java has Currency class that represents the ISO 4217 currency codes. BigDecimal is the best type for representing currency decimal values.
Float & Double are bad for financial (even for military use) world, never use them for monetary calculations. If precision is one of your requirements, use BigDecimal instead.
Python's float type is a natural first step to represent monetary amounts in the code. Almost all platforms map Python floats to IEEE-754 “double precision”.
Never use a floating point number to represent money. Floating numbers do not represent numbers in decimal notation accurately. You would end with a nightmare of compound rounding errors, and unable to reliably convert between currencies. See Martin Fowler's short essay on the subject.
If you decide to write your own class, I recommend basing it on the decimal data type.
I don't think python-money is a good option, because it wasn't maintained for quite some time and its source code has some strange and useless code, and exchanging currencies is simply broken.
Try py-moneyed. It's an improvement over python-money.
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