How to calculate tax in Swift

When performing any type of financial calculation, it is best not to use floating point numbers. Performing arithmetic in base 10 will allow you to avoid unexpected errors in how floats represent some decimals. Fortunately, Apple provides the NSDecimalNumber class to handle calculations using base 10 arithmetic.

Tax calculation example:

let price: Int = 15 // $15
let priceDecimalNumber = NSDecimalNumber(integer: price)

let taxPercentage = NSDecimalNumber(string: "0.09") // 9%

let tax = priceDecimalNumber.decimalNumberByMultiplyingBy(taxPercentage)
let taxDouble = tax.doubleValue // Retrieve the double value

More information about floating point arithmetic:
http://floating-point-gui.de/basic/

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