Re: documentation update for doc/src/sgml/func.sgml

On 08/21/2014 11:53 AM, Fabien COELHO wrote:
>
>> attached is a small patch which updates doc/src/sgml/func.sgml. The
>> change explains that functions like round() and others might behave
>> different depending on your operating system (because of rint(3)) and
>> that this is according to an IEEE standard. It also points out that
>> #.5 is not always rounded up, as expected from a mathematical point of
>> view.
>
> Applied on head & read. I'm not a native English speaker, but the
> English looked right to me.

Thanks.

> Comments:
>
> I'm not sure that the "note that" on the third line is useful.
>
> I do not understand why the last sentence in the first paragraph about
> bitwise ops is put there with rounding issues, which seem unrelated. It
> seems to me that it belongs to the second paragraph which is about
> bitwise operators.

That's the part which came from Josh Berkus. We discussed this patch on IRC.

> The wikipedia link can be simplified to a much cleaner:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_floating_point#Rounding_rules

It can, but then you always refer to the latest version of the Wikipedia
page, which might or might not be a good idea. The link in the patch
points to the current version from yesterday, no matter how many changes
are introduced afterwards.

But yes:

> Also, I submitted docs with relevant wikipedia links which was stripped
> of these before committing. I'm wondering whether there is a general
> policy not to put external links from within the text in the
> documentation. There are very few of them, most in "acronym.sgml".

It would be nice to have a general rule how to handle external links.

> I would suggest to put relevant tags around functions and types, like:
> "<function>round()</>" and "<type>NUMERIC</>".

Can do.

Thanks,

--
Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
German PostgreSQL User Group
European PostgreSQL User Group - Board of Directors
Volunteer Regional Contact, Germany - PostgreSQL Project