> However, what money *really* needs is more precision. Has there been
> any thought of working on the full SQL exact-numeric package?
Yes. The problem is that afaik there is no variable-width exact numeric
package available. BCD arithmetic could work if a package were
available. The GNU extended precision package looks interesting, but we
would have to translate from a string to internal format for every
operation, or somehow store the internal representation in each tuple
which seems messy.
I'm thinking of moving the 64-bit integer contrib package I wrote into
the native backend as a foundation for the numeric/decimal data types.
We would need to get feedback from more of the supported platforms on
how to do 64-bit integers (a few processors have them as a "long" type,
and the GNU 32-bit compilers seem to allow a "long long" declaration,
but I don't know what other systems do for this).
The only other thing which would need to be handled is how to pass along
the two value precision/scale parameters which are a part of the
declaration for these types. I've just finished working on the type
conversion algorithms so understand the current "atttypmod" field a bit
better, but have not decided how to extend it to multiple fields.
- Tom