What is the best data type to use for money in C

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As it is described at decimal as      The decimal keyword indicates a 128-bit data type  Compared to   floating-point types  the decimal type has more precision and a   smaller range  which makes it appropriate for financial and monetary   calculations    You can use a decimal as follows   decimal myMoney   300 5m

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Use the Money pattern from Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture  specify amount as decimal and the currency as an enum

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Decimal  If you choose double you re leaving yourself open to rounding errors

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Most applications I ve worked with use decimal to represent money  This is based on the assumption that the application will never be concerned with more than one currency    This assumption may be based on another assumption  that the application will never be used in other countries with different currencies  I ve seen cases where that proved to be false    Now that assumption is being challenged in a new way  New currencies such as Bitcoin are becoming more common  and they aren t specific to any country  It s not unrealistic that an application used in just one country may still need to support multiple currencies    Some people will say that creating or even using a type just for money is  gold plating   or adding extra complexity beyond the known requirements  I strongly disagree  The more ubiquitous a concept is within your domain  the more important it is to make a reasonable effort to use the correct abstraction up front  If you want to see complexity  try working in an application that used to use decimal and now there s an additional Currency property next to every decimal property   If you use the wrong abstraction up front  replacing it later will be a hundred times more work  That means potentially introducing defects into existing code  and the best part is that those defects will likely involve amounts of money  transactions with money  or just anything with money   And it s not that difficult to use something other than decimal  Google  nuget money type  and you ll see that numerous developers have created such abstractions  including me   It s easy  It s as easy as using DateTime instead of storing a date in a string

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System Decimal     The Decimal value type represents decimal numbers ranging from positive 79 228 162 514 264 337 593 543 950 335 to negative 79 228 162 514 264 337 593 543 950 335  The Decimal value type is appropriate for financial calculations requiring large numbers of significant integral and fractional digits and no round-off errors  The Decimal type does not eliminate the need for rounding  Rather  it minimizes errors due to rounding    I d like to point to this excellent answer by zneak on why double shouldn t be used

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Create your own class   This seems odd  but a  Net type is inadequate to cover different currencies

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Another option  especially if you re rolling you own class  is to use an int or a int64  and designate the lower four digits  or possibly even 2  as  right of the decimal point    So  on the edges  you ll need some    10000  on the way in and some    10000  on the way out   This is the storage mechanism used by Microsoft s SQL Server  see http   msdn microsoft com en-au library ms179882 aspx  The nicity of this is that all your summation can be done using  fast  integer arithmetic

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decimal has a smaller range  but greater precision - so you don t lose all those pennies over time   Full details here   http   msdn microsoft com en-us library 364x0z75 aspx

User · Answer

Agree with the Money pattern  Handling currencies is just too cumbersome when you use decimals   If you create a Currency-class  you can then put all the logic relating to money there  including a correct ToString  -method  more control of parsing values and better control of divisions   Also  with a Currency class  there is no chance of unintentionally mixing money up with other data

[c#] What is the best data type to use for money in C#?

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