From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,91965a012526b259 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news4.google.com!news.glorb.com!cyclone1.gnilink.net!gnilink.net!news-east.rr.com!news.rr.com!news-server.columbus.rr.com!fe2.columbus.rr.com.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "John B. Matthews" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Float to String References: User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.4 (PPC Mac OS X) Message-ID: Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 00:40:41 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.31.62.213 X-Complaints-To: abuse@rr.com X-Trace: fe2.columbus.rr.com 1099960841 65.31.62.213 (Mon, 08 Nov 2004 19:40:41 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 19:40:41 EST Organization: Road Runner High Speed Online http://www.rr.com Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:6059 Date: 2004-11-09T00:40:41+00:00 List-Id: In article , "David C. Hoos" wrote: [...] > The problem in that case was that values stored in an Oracle database > when later extracted sometimes differed in the lsb. > > What makes the problem similar is that Oracle required the data to be > stored in decimal format. The problem with that is that decimal numbers > are not, in general, exactly representable in binary. E.g. the decimal > number 0.1 is a non-terminating binary number. Indeed. To guarantee portability among the 90-odd Oracle platforms, they typically store numeric data using binary coded decimal (BCD) with exponent. This neatly avoids the problem of binary-decimal conversion. Might the data type Interfaces.COBOL.Packed_Decimal (or something similar) be a useful intermediate storage format? -- John ---- jmatthews at wright dot edu www dot wright dot edu/~john.matthews/