- From: Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>
- Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 21:03:08 -0800
- To: Damien Fisher <damien@sodatech.com>
- Cc: www-ql@w3.org
Damien Fisher wrote: > But shouldn't the specification make it clear what the intended semantics > are? Of course. > How are people supposed to write implementation-independent queries if the > minimum level of precision isn't guaranteed? xs:double follows the IEEE > standard, and hence, if someone needs to, they can make sure their code > works on many different platforms easily. I don't see how this is possible > with the xs:decimal functions (as they are currently defined). I don't expect exact rationals to become part of the XQuery language specifiction, nor should implementations implement it unless part of the specification. I'm just saying it would be reasonable to design a language to handle exact rational decimals. Other languages have done it. > Finally, exact rationals, while perhaps desirable in some cases, can lead to > an explosion in memory usage if not controlled carefully, since there is no > upper bound on the precision used in the calculations. A simple example: > compute (1/2)^n, for some very large n. How is this different from 2^n for some very large n? -- --Per Bothner per@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/
Received on Wednesday, 10 December 2003 00:13:36 UTC