Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> At first I meant that as a reductio ad absurdum argument, but, uh,
> come to think of it why *do* we have our own arbitrary precision
> library? Is there any particular reason we can't use one of the
> existing binary implementations?
Going over to binary storage would trade off I/O speed for calculation
speed, which is probably not a win for everyone; and even more
seriously, how are you going to represent decimal fractions exactly?
The fact that 0.01 is 0.01 and not just a near approximation thereto
is critical for a lot of our users.
I have no objection to relying on someone else's package if it actually
solves our problem, but not if it just solves a related problem.
(It might be interesting to offer a "bignum" datatype that uses binary
math internally, but replacing numeric with it would be a hard sell.)
regards, tom lane