Re: Re: floating point representation

At 10:19 21/02/01 +0100, Robert Schrem wrote:
>The advantage would be, that we only generate as much ASCII data
>as absolutly neccessary to rebuild the original data exactly.
>At least this is what I would expect from pg_dump.

pg_dump is only one side of thre problem, but the simplest solution might
be to add an option to dump the hex mantissa, exponent & sign. This should
be low-cost and an exact representation of the machine version of the number.

The other issues, like what is sent to psql & via interfaces like odbc
(currently text) should be application/DBA based and setable on a
per-attribute basis. eg. some applications want 1.0000 because the data
came from a piece of hardware with a know error, and 1.0000 means 1.0000+/-
0.00005 etc. Maybe this is just an argument for a new 'number with error'
type...

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