In the interest of creating cross-platform code, I'd like to develop a simple financial application in JavaScript. The calculations required involve compound interest and relatively long decimal numbers. I'd like to know what mistakes to avoid when using JavaScript to do this type of math—if it is possible at all!
You should probably scale your decimal values by 100, and represent all the monetary values in whole cents. This is to avoid problems with floating-point logic and arithmetic. There is no decimal data type in JavaScript - the only numeric data type is floating-point. Therefore it is generally recommended to handle money as 2550 cents instead of 25.50 dollars.
Consider that in JavaScript:
var result = 1.0 + 2.0; // (result === 3.0) returns true
But:
var result = 0.1 + 0.2; // (result === 0.3) returns false
The expression 0.1 + 0.2 === 0.3 returns false, but fortunately integer arithmetic in floating-point is exact, so decimal representation errors can be avoided by scaling1.
Note that while the set of real numbers is infinite, only a finite number of them (18,437,736,874,454,810,627 to be exact) can be represented exactly by the JavaScript floating-point format. Therefore the representation of the other numbers will be an approximation of the actual number2.
1 Douglas Crockford: JavaScript: The Good Parts: Appendix A - Awful Parts (page 105).
2 David Flanagan: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition: 3.1.3 Floating-Point Literals (page 31).