At 08:08 01/03/2010 -0800, Brewster Gillett wrote:
Brian Barker wrote:
Mind you, ZIP data should probably all be text, in fact.
That's an intriguing notion. Since ZIPs only ever consist of
numbers, why would it be preferable to store them as text? So as to
avoid confusion with "real" numbers?
Oh, because they are not numbers, but just labels with an accepted
collating order. I'm sure that Californians, with 9xxxx, see
themselves as three times as important as Georgians (3xxxx) and nine
times New Yorkers (1xxxx) - though they wouldn't like thinking that
Alaska was tops! But the codes don't have this numeric
significance. And consider Boston's Symphony Hall, with 02115: that
leading zero is insignificant in a number, and would be dropped,
giving 2115; as part of a label, on the other hand, the zero is more
significant than any other of the digits.
Brian Barker
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