On 11/2/05, Brass Tilde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Am I alone in thinking that a division operator that does > > different things depending on the declared datatype of a > > column is an abomination? > > Absolutely not.
If it should do division the same way for every operation then you must require the result to be able to represent every possible division result. IE the result must be floating point. If you're writing the inner loop for a quake engine there are very good reasons for not wanting to pay the time penalty for floating point operations. If you're creating a very large database why should you pay for 80 bits (an IEEE float) of storage when 8 will do just fine? There are very good reasons for these things. Just because they don't apply to you doesn't make them an "abomination".
