Re: [Pnet-developers] Formatting of System.Decimal

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Thursday 17 March 2005 07:57 pm, Marcus wrote:

> Between version 1.0 and 1.1, MS changed its behavior to conform to the ECMA
> more closely. The spec requires that Decimals preserve trailing zeros
> across most operations. On the other hand, the trailing zeros are not
> significant for equality comparisons, so 12.246 and 12.246000 should
> compare equal. However, the code fragment
>
>               Decimal value = 12.246000m;
>               Console.WriteLine(value.ToString());
>
> should print 12.246000 (preserving the trailing zeros).

The current pnet code normalizes the decimal point position after every 
operation (pnet/support/decimal.c).  I suppose it would be possible to modify 
the normalization operation to preserve trailing zeros if the result will 
still fit in the 96-bit mantissa.

Then some modifications may be needed to the formatting code in pnetlib to use 
the exponent to position the decimal point correctly.

> I believe that Pnet has two problems: First, cscc is discarding trailing
> zeros in Decimal constants.

This is due to the normalization that occurs in ILDecimalParse, which would be 
fixed if decimal.c is modified as described above.

Cheers,

Rhys.