[Chandler-dev] Fixed-point number support

[Andi Vajda]

On Mon, 13 Nov 2006, Morgen Sagen wrote:

> 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)?

It depends what you want out of it ?
If python has a decimal type (it looks like it does ?) it should be easy 
enough to add support for that.

Andi..