Re: Storing trailing zeros in mantissa

ctcgag_at_hotmail.com wrote in message news:<20030801122021.888$dk_at_newsreader.com>...
> "Jim Kennedy" <kennedy-down_with_spammers_at_no-spam.comcast.net> wrote:
> > Noons is correct. Jeff, the difference is purely one of display and not
> > one of actual percision.
>
> You and Norm clearly are not scientists! The difference between
> 10.2 and 1.02e1 is purely one of display, the difference between
> 10.2 and 10.20 is not, they differ in the number of significant
> digits. The fact that Oracle (nor any other RDBMS or programming
> language I'm aware) does not support this does not mean it isn't
> real. We're left with the options of either storing them
> as varchar2 (Ugh ugh), or using two columns, one for the number
> and one for the precision (Ugh) (or, one for the number in numeric
> form, and one the number in string form).

Minor niggle:

There are plenty of programming languages that support metadata to describe precision. I work with a language that does that to support different currencies (storage, input and display can all have different values), as well as different database back ends. I'm frankly amazed that is not built into all modern programming languages, as I thought it was a pretty normal thing in 1980, even if one had to write library routines for some old languages like Fortran or Basic.

jg

--
@home.com is bogus.
Not THAT Basic!