Bonjour Michaël,
And my 2c on the matter is that switching silently from one version to
the other would be unwelcome. The user should be aware if a test is
overflowing a number when specifying an integer.
This whole integer pow version is becoming unduly complicated and ugly.
For me, the rational of having the ipow implementation was to have a
precise integer result when possible. Now that it is casted to double and
the precision is lost, the whole point of ipow is moot, even if there is
some performance gain.
So given that committers do not want the int/double version because it is
slightly different from the numeric/double version of SQL (obviously), and
that the integer version is becoming over complicated with checks and
warnings or errors, I'm now in favor of just dropping it, and provide the
double version only.
Too bad for integer computations on keys which is the core of pgbench use
case, but I can't help it.
--
Fabien.
