[Chandler-dev] Fixed-point number support

[Morgen Sagen]

I just sent the following email to cosmo-dev...

> The issue of supporting floating point numbers in EIM records has  
> come up and raised some questions about precision and rounding, and  
> whether Chandler needs to get back exactly what it writes to  
> Cosmo.  After some IRC discussion in #chandler it seems like it  
> makes sense for the places where Chandler needs to share non- 
> integer numbers, we should replace those with Decimal (fixed point)  
> values.  That would solve the problem of round-trip data not coming  
> back to Chandler exactly the same way it was written to Cosmo, and  
> also allows CosmoUI to understand these values (in other words,  
> they're not just an opaque series of bytes that only Chandler  
> understands).  Decimal seems to be supported in SQL as well.

...to see if they're on board with supporting the Decimal (fixed- 
point number) type, and I also want to get feedback from Chandler  
engineers about moving the few shared floating point values (only one  
now, but soon two) we have to fixed-point, to avoid the round-trip  
precision problems (not getting back exactly what we published) we face.

If we go this route, what would it take to add Decimal support to the  
repository (Andi)?

~morgen