Re: [HACKERS] floating point representation

[Philip Warner]

At 15:48 20/02/01 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>
>The existing default of FLT_DIG or DBL_DIG digits seems like a good
>general-purpose policy, but it doesn't meet all needs.  For pg_dump,
>we clearly would like to promise exact dump and restore.  On the
>other side, the geometry regress tests would like to suppress a few
>of the noisier low-order digits.  And we frequently see questions from
>users about how they can display fewer digits than the system wants to
>give them --- or, more generally, format the output in some special
>form.
>

If I could add another 'nice-to-have' in here: the ability on a
per-attribute basis to specify the preferred output format. This could
apply to real, date, integer etc etc. Clearly not a 7.1 feature.




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