Fred, you are right on the money. For some reason generations of
software has been inflicted on the commercial user with numbers stored
as floating point, a complete design failure. The consequent rounding
vagaries make the implementation of simple accounting or other
fundamental arithmetic applications a misery.
Way back the problem was efficiently addressed with BCD integer
arithmetic and storage, but it is a lesson destined to be forgotten and
perpetually re-invented.
JS
Fred Williams wrote:
Well, since you put it that way. May I go one step farther and request
that this new Dynamic Type also adhere to "Bankers Rounding" commonly
implemented as BCD in other so equipped databases.
For years I have spent countless hours testing and sweating rounding
and comparisons using "Float" (Real?) fields because (IMHO) the database
designers were scientific mathematicians and the world of users were
99%^ business types. So, spare me further anguish... :-)
Fred
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2005 12:55 PM
To: sqlite-users@sqlite.org
Subject: Re: [sqlite] Proposed 3.3.0 changes. Was: 5/2==2
...
Please let me restate the proposed change: I desire to change
SQLite so that it no longer distinguishes between integer and
real. The two concepts are merged into a unified "numeric"
type. Just as the same string can be represented as either
UTF-8 or UTF-16 (or sometimes ISO-8859) so too can a number
be represented as integer or real. But regardless of the
particular representation chosen at any particular moment,
the "type" of the data is always "numeric". There is no
"integer". There is no "real". There is only "numeric".
And because all number values are of the same type, they
need to always be treated in the same way. A division should
return a result that includes the fractional part, if there
is one, regardless of the particular representation of the
operands.
This a simplification designed to make your life easier. No
longer are there different rules to apply depending on whether
a value or a column is "integer" or "real". Everything always
works the same way. The goal is to have no special cases.
...
