On 4/2/2013 12:50 AM, Gavin Flower wrote:
In the bad old days when I was a COBOL programmer we always stored money in the COBOL equivalent of an integer (numeric without a fractional part) to avoid round off, but we displayed with a decimal point to digits to the left. So storing as an integer (actually bigint would be required) is a good idea, with parameters to say how many effective digits in the fractional part, and how many fractional digits to display etc. - as you said.
COBOL Numeric was BCD. same as NUMERIC in SQL (yes, I know postgresql internally uses a base 10000 notation for this, storing it as an array of short ints, but effectively its equivalent to BCD).
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john r pierce 37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast