Fix precision and rounding issues in money multiplication and division.
The cash_div_intX functions applied rint() to the result of the division.
That's not merely useless (because the result is already an integer) but
it causes precision loss for values larger than 2^52 or so, because of
the forced conversion to float8.
On the other hand, the cash_mul_fltX functions neglected to apply rint() to
their multiplication results, thus possibly causing off-by-one outputs.
Per C standard, arithmetic between any integral value and a float value is
performed in float format. Thus, cash_mul_flt4 and cash_div_flt4 produced
answers good to only about six digits, even when the float value is exact.
We can improve matters noticeably by widening the float inputs to double.
(It's tempting to consider using "long double" arithmetic if available,
but that's probably too much of a stretch for a back-patched fix.)
Also, document that cash_div_intX operators truncate rather than round.
Per bug #14663 from Richard Pistole. Back-patch to all supported branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/22403.1495223615@sss.pgh.pa.us
Branch
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master
Details
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https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/d761fe2182d9e26f9483e4b7ac303e38bfbd7a24
Modified Files
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doc/src/sgml/datatype.sgml | 5 ++++
src/backend/utils/adt/cash.c | 16 ++++++------
src/test/regress/expected/money.out | 50 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
src/test/regress/sql/money.sql | 12 +++++++++
4 files changed, 75 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)