2009/8/4 Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>:
> Brendan Jurd <direvus@gmail.com> writes:
>> Well, I tried this and as it turns out the patch casts the value to a
>> float8 in order to pass it on to snprintf for sci-notation formatting.
>
> Well, that's pretty dumb. Quite aside from the range problem, that
> would mean that you lose everything past the sixteenth or so digit.
> I think that's sufficient grounds for bouncing the patch back for
> rework right there.
>
I agree.
> What I'd consider instead is calling numeric_out and then working
> with the result of that. It would always be f-format, so you'd
> have to do your own conversion to e-format, but you could do it
> without any risk of precision or range loss.
>
Yeah, I figured as much. I'll see what I can do about reworking the
numeric case. I should be able to post a new revision in the next day
or so, but I certainly won't cry foul if this gets punted to
September.
Cheers,
BJ