I ran into this oddity today and tested it on a few of our PosgreSQL backends (all of which gave the same response):
phil=# select 3.85::float4*1;
?column? ------------------
3.84999990463257
(1 row)
phil=# select 3.85::float4*1::float8;
?column? ------------------
3.84999990463257
phil=# select (3.85::float4)::float8;
float8 ------------------
3.84999990463257
(1 row)
(Or substitute 3.85 for any number with something other than 0 to the right of the decimal point, or pull the same values from any table which stores in float4/real format.)
Obviously, this is wrong and should return 3.85. We traced this down on an ecom server which was shaving off pennies from some transactions (because we truncate to the hundredths place instead of rounding what we get back from the SQL backend).
The newest server we have is 7.3.2, so I haven't tried this on the current 7.3.3 release.
phil=# select version();
version ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PostgreSQL 7.3.2 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 3.2 20020903 (Red Hat Linux 8.0 3.2-7)
(1 row)
Phil
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