> When you say "finance" I assume you mean Wall Street type stuff?
Nope, pretty much any common financial software. Excel is most likely the most used software for doing finance of any type - it's floating point. Quicken is the most common personal finance - floating point. I'd guess the majority of personal finance programs do stuff like mortgages and credit card calculations, which will hit the same compound interest failures I listed above if you try to do it in fixed point, so they'd all be floating point.
If ALL you do is addition, then fixed point could work. But it fails at every other basic accounting task that it would be ludicrous to do any modern or even toy programs in it any more. Compound interest, mortgages, taxes, wealth planning - all floating point. Top 20 hits on github for finance - all use floating point for the math.
All the top hits for ERP on github - floating point. Top ERP commercial systems [1], list Microsoft Dynamics as #1. Looking at features it's most certainly floating point (it has calculated fields allowing arbitrary probabilities, for example). Second place on list is Syspro. Same thing - looking through their documentation they allow arbitrary spreadsheet like computations, even allowing machine learning stuff to be integrated for computations - this is certainly floating point. Third on list is QT9 ERP. Same result - they have modules called "Finance" that allow arbitrary calculations, which is certainly not done in fixed point. Multiple other modules look like they'd need floating point since fixed point would simply accumulate error too quickly (and be slow).
Alternatively if you have any of these programs, you could pull them apart pretty quickly with Ghidra and you'd likely find all floating point math in them.
While fixed-point has uses, it is not used nearly as much any more as people want to believe, and it's certainly a terrible idea for any finance beyond addition if simple numbers, i.e., a checkbook (which itself is getting outdated). If you cannot even do something as simple as compound interest, then I'd hesitate to call it finance software.
In the 1980s, floating point hardware was uncommon, there was no IEEE 754. The computing and finance has moved so far beyond the 1980s that I even doubt much modern greenfield accounting software is fixed point any more.
The databases use NUMERIC/DECIMAL data types almost exclusively. Once in a while you will find a floating point type but it's pretty rare.
The code they write is not generally available to the public so I'm not sure what they are doing inside their code. Some probably use java's BigDecimal, some probably wrote their own libraries to handle data types (e.g. SAP).
> If ALL you do is addition, then fixed point could work. But it fails at every other basic accounting task that it would be ludicrous to do any modern or even toy programs in it any more.
How about the basic task of storing 0.1 or 0.01, it seems pretty good at that and float (binary float) struggles.
Decimal float works, which is why IBM but the DFP units on the Power and Z cpu's.
Nope, pretty much any common financial software. Excel is most likely the most used software for doing finance of any type - it's floating point. Quicken is the most common personal finance - floating point. I'd guess the majority of personal finance programs do stuff like mortgages and credit card calculations, which will hit the same compound interest failures I listed above if you try to do it in fixed point, so they'd all be floating point.
If ALL you do is addition, then fixed point could work. But it fails at every other basic accounting task that it would be ludicrous to do any modern or even toy programs in it any more. Compound interest, mortgages, taxes, wealth planning - all floating point. Top 20 hits on github for finance - all use floating point for the math.
All the top hits for ERP on github - floating point. Top ERP commercial systems [1], list Microsoft Dynamics as #1. Looking at features it's most certainly floating point (it has calculated fields allowing arbitrary probabilities, for example). Second place on list is Syspro. Same thing - looking through their documentation they allow arbitrary spreadsheet like computations, even allowing machine learning stuff to be integrated for computations - this is certainly floating point. Third on list is QT9 ERP. Same result - they have modules called "Finance" that allow arbitrary calculations, which is certainly not done in fixed point. Multiple other modules look like they'd need floating point since fixed point would simply accumulate error too quickly (and be slow).
Alternatively if you have any of these programs, you could pull them apart pretty quickly with Ghidra and you'd likely find all floating point math in them.
While fixed-point has uses, it is not used nearly as much any more as people want to believe, and it's certainly a terrible idea for any finance beyond addition if simple numbers, i.e., a checkbook (which itself is getting outdated). If you cannot even do something as simple as compound interest, then I'd hesitate to call it finance software.
In the 1980s, floating point hardware was uncommon, there was no IEEE 754. The computing and finance has moved so far beyond the 1980s that I even doubt much modern greenfield accounting software is fixed point any more.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-erp-sy...