Re: Money type

On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 06:11:43AM -0400, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> I know that the money type is supposed to be deprecated but I think that

Right.

> there is still some benefit to it. It is small and fast. There are some
> problems and I would like to address them.
>
> The output has a dollar sign attached. This is NA centric and we said years
> ago that we were going to drop it. I think that that is enough warning.
> Unless someone has a problem with that I will just go in and get rid of it.
>
> Also somewhat NA centric is the two decimal places. This was originally
> meant to be locale driven but that is a problem for other reasons. What
> about defaulting it to two decimal places but allowing it to be redefined at
> table creation time? How hard would it be to make it accept an optional
> precision?
>
> It doesn't cast to other types. If it simply cast to float that would allow
> it to be more flexible. Do I need to add a float return function for that to
> work?
>
> Limited precision. This can be fixed by going to a 64 bit integer for the
> underlying type. Are we at a point where we can do that yet? I am afraid
> that there are still systems that don't have a native 64 bit type. This is
> not as critical as the other items I think.

I think right is use numeric and to_char() for currency symbol and
common and locales correct number formatting. IMHO it's better than
use dagerous float and hard coded currency symbol.

For example in my country (and a lot of others) is the current money
datetype total useless. We have currency symbol after number, etc.

Sorry but _IMHO_ is better a less good supported types than more
bad datetypes.

Karel

--
Karel Zak <zakkr(at)zf(dot)jcu(dot)cz>
http://home.zf.jcu.cz/~zakkr/

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