Re:An Eight in a Million chance (consultants, interns, MS Ac...
by lrobb on Thursday February 09, 2012 @08:13AM
(#3570962)
Speaking of rounding errors...
I worked telecom billing about 10 years ago... Our system consisted of a couple dozen fairly large C++ programs, and numerous DBF tables.
This system was originally written in Clipper(1), which IIRC defines numeric as an 18 digit text field. Well, when that particular program got ported to C++, the author simply used a 32-bit int in place of NUMERIC... Which needless to say worked just fine up until we started getting clients that had values larger than 2^31-1 for that field.
The scary part, is that it would just overflow, so you wouldn't get any errors... It wasn't until some guy in ops noticed a number that just seemed a little too odd.
1: Serendipity: The founder was a medical student that happened to know clipper, that happened to have a friend that had just started a telecom company and needed a billing solution (right after the Bell breakup).
I worked telecom billing about 10 years ago... Our system consisted of a couple dozen fairly large C++ programs, and numerous DBF tables.
This system was originally written in Clipper(1), which IIRC defines numeric as an 18 digit text field. Well, when that particular program got ported to C++, the author simply used a 32-bit int in place of NUMERIC... Which needless to say worked just fine up until we started getting clients that had values larger than 2^31-1 for that field.
The scary part, is that it would just overflow, so you wouldn't get any errors... It wasn't until some guy in ops noticed a number that just seemed a little too odd.
1: Serendipity: The founder was a medical student that happened to know clipper, that happened to have a friend that had just started a telecom company and needed a billing solution (right after the Bell breakup).