On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 11:16, Stephan Szabo wrote:
> On Fri, 20 May 2005, Scott Marlowe wrote:
>
> > 2: How many people who DO work with large exponents and need arbitrary
> > precision have looked at postgresql, typed in "select 3^100" got back
> > 5.15377520732011e+47, and simply went to another piece of software and
> > never looked back? We don't know. And the attitude that it seems
> > useless to me so it must be useless to everybody else isn't going to
> > help attract people who do things that seem esoteric and strange to you,
> > but are important to them.
>
> As a note, I don't think it's useless. I simply think the argument that
> anything that can be included should is invalid. I could make
> equivalent arguments for a whole lot of things and that's when the cost
> argument starts making more sense.
Agreed. However, I think that if PostgreSQL has support for numerics of
1000 characters, it might make sense for it to have the operators to
ensure that operations exist for most if not all common mathmatical
operations, especially since many esoteric math functions could make use
of such accuracy.
I wonder what Joe Conway's take on all this would be, since he's the guy
that made PL/R a reality.
I don't think we should include anything that could be added either. U
just don't like surprises, which is what I consider it when I raise one
numeric to another numeric and get a floating point answer.