Thank for the replies and I appreciate the suggestions, however they some of the rationale behind them doesn't match well my experience.
First, BigDecimal is plenty fast the large business systems I've worked on. Actually, it has been plenty fast for every large business system I've worked on. This includes a group insurance rate engine that generated hundreds of thousands of calculations in each web request. Second, storing values with implied decimal points is a nightmare. In the insurance application for example, some of the rate tables have precision to three decimal places, others to five. Picking some arbitrary value imposes code complexity throughout the whole in app in a very nasty way. Of course, what happens when you need to change that value two years from now? Unless there's a really good performance issue for a given application, I would never pick implied decimal representation over BigDecimals. Finally, for the business applications I've worked with, I haven't had to worry about representing all rationals, just base 10 numbers. In my experience, using BigDecimal by default for any number with a decimal point has worked out very well for balancing the needs of accuracy, speed and code complexity. It appears that the answer to the original question is "no, there is no way to configure the reader to default numbers with a decimal point to be BigDecimal instead of Double". Scott Hickey -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
