On Feb 19, 2013, at 7:58 PM, Luca Morandini <[email protected]> wrote:
> Well, it is not a matter of precision -as it may be enough for most purposes- > but > of external representation: every user would expect to get back the same data > he > had put into the database. But you _can’t_ put a number like 0.1 into a binary floating-point value; only a very close approximation of it. It’s a mathematical impossibility, because 0.1 has an infinite number of digits in binary. So round-trip fidelity is impossible. The only way to store a number like that exactly is to represent it as BCD or fixed-point or as a string. (It seems weird to be explaining this to someone with an IEEE email address…) It sounds like you are just going to have to accept tiny bits of roundoff error. If you think it makes the numbers look ugly, make your app do a bit of truncation when it displays them. It seems like hyperbole to say that this is going to block your project. —Jens
