On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Greg Stark <st...@mit.edu> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 5:47 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: >> Also, as was pointed out upthread, the underlying data in shared memory >> is almost certainly never going to be infinite-precision; so using >> numeric in the API seems to me to be more likely to convey a false >> impression of exactness than to do anything useful. > > I don't think that follows. The underlyng data will be measured in > some metric unit of time like microsecond or nanosecond or something > like that. So a base-10 representation will show exactly the precision > that the underlying data has. On the other hand a floating point > number will show a base-2 approximation that may in fact display with > more digits than the underlying data representation has.
I wholeheartedly agree. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
