The strangest way of rounding down to the nearest quarter
In a previous life, I wrote database software.A customer complained that one of their reports was taking anunacceptably long amount of time to generate, and I was askedto take a look at it even though it wasn’t my account.
The report was a vacation-days report, listing the number ofvacation days taken and available for each employee. Vacationdays accrued at a fixed rate but were granted only inquarter-day increments. For example, if you earned 15 vacationdays per year and the year was 32% complete, then you hadaccrued 32% × 15 = 4.8 vacation days, of which 4.75 wereavailable to use.
The existing code to round the number of accrued days down tothe nearest quarter-day went something like this:
* assume that at this point, ACCRUED is the number * of accrued days. PRIVATE S,F * STR(ACCRUED,6,2) converts ACCRUED to a 6-character * string: 3 integer digits, a decimal point, and two * fractional digits. Excess fractional digits are rounded. STORE STR(ACCRUED,6,2) TO S STORE RIGHT(S,2) TO F && extract digits after decimal IF F < "25" F = "00" && 00 to 24 becomes 00 ELSE IF F < "50" F = "25" && 25 to 49 becomes 25 ELSE IF F < "75" F = "50" && 50 to 74 becomes 50 ELSE F = "75" && 75 to 99 becomes 75 ENDIF ENDIF ENDIF ROUNDED = VAL(LEFT(S,4) + F) && reconstruct value and convert
In other words, the code converted the number to a string,extracted the digits after the decimal point, did string comparisonsto figure out which quartile the fraction resided in, thencreated a new string with the replacement fraction and convertedthat string back to a number.And all this in an interpreted language.
This code fragment was repeated each time rounding-down wasneeded because the language supported only 32 subroutines,and this procedure wasn’t important enough to be worth kickingout one of the other existing subroutines.
I replaced this seventeen-line monstrosity with the one-lineequivalent each time it occurred, and the report ran much faster.
(This is nowhere near the strangest way of implementing rounding.There are far worse examples.)
Exercise: What is the one-line equivalent?
Exercise: What is the double-rounding bug in the originalcode?
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