> Please let me restate the proposed change: I desire to change > SQLite so that it no longer distinguishes between integer and > real.
Put this way, this seems to be a good idea, provided that there isn't a performance penalty. Most of the numbers I store in SQLite databases are small integers, and it would be a shame if things were slower as a result. There is a problem, though, if you use SQLite from a language with a different form of manifestant types. In current Python versions, for example, integers and floats are a different type, and integer division yields integers (but the Python developers plan to change this) -- and there is no separate division operator for floats. Currently, the Python type is preserved when writing an integer or float to the database, after your change, it won't. The fix on the Python side is not particularly pleasant: you must add calls to the float function before you can use a value returned from the database in a division operation. (Ruby has a similar problem, it seem. Most Lisps and Perl don't. Statically typed languages are unaffected by the change.)
