I just sent the following email to cosmo-dev...
The issue of supporting floating point numbers in EIM records has come up and raised some questions about precision and rounding, and whether Chandler needs to get back exactly what it writes to Cosmo. After some IRC discussion in #chandler it seems like it makes sense for the places where Chandler needs to share non- integer numbers, we should replace those with Decimal (fixed point) values. That would solve the problem of round-trip data not coming back to Chandler exactly the same way it was written to Cosmo, and also allows CosmoUI to understand these values (in other words, they're not just an opaque series of bytes that only Chandler understands). Decimal seems to be supported in SQL as well.
...to see if they're on board with supporting the Decimal (fixed- point number) type, and I also want to get feedback from Chandler engineers about moving the few shared floating point values (only one now, but soon two) we have to fixed-point, to avoid the round-trip precision problems (not getting back exactly what we published) we face.
If we go this route, what would it take to add Decimal support to the repository (Andi)?
~morgen _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "chandler-dev" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/chandler-dev
