Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rule as stated is way too strong, for example option prices are money amounts but floats are unavoidable in calculating them. For a less exotic example, consider that Excel, widely used by actual accountants, uses floats throughout to represent numbers.
> for example option prices are money amounts but floats are unavoidable in calculating them. How so? Can't you just use long integers with cents or 1/1000th of a cent?
Even for plain-vanilla bond price calculations, floats are the right tool for the job. Say you have a bond that pays $5 every year for 10 years, then $100. What's that worth today?
Well, you have a forecast yield curve of interest rates. Say it's quoted as continuously compounded rates, so then you get something like price = sum_{t=1..10}($5*exp(-r(t)*t)) + $100*exp(-r(10)*10).
But wait, say you actually have 1000 different potential paths of interest rates, and you want to average over all of them.
Oh, and there's a 1% chance of default every year.
Oh, and actually these are mortgages, so there's a path-dependent chance of them refinancing every year, if the rates get low enough.
And then there's an overall economic forecast, so if you have a bunch of mortgages, there's a bigger chance they'll all default at the same time.
And so on. Rounding the cents isn't really worth the worry, once you're putting noisy forecasts through `exp` (or worse special functions).
This applies for vanilla bond valuation, any option, any future. More so if you want risk measures (what if rates go up 0.10%? volatility increases?), and so on.
Floats work just fine for this.