RE: Representation of floating point values.

At 9:44 AM -0800 050309, Daniel Engovatov wrote:
>  >>Oh, well.  I guess those who care about large numbers will just find a
>>>way to bypass this schema limitation.
>
>>Yes.  The decimal datatype allows large numbers, and the proposed
>  >pDecimal will allow both large numbers and scientific notation.
>
>The issue that I was referring to is that the current mapping loses
>information, not that a large number can not be represented.

Precisely.  The question is what to do about potential lexical
representations whose exact value is too large.  float and double
round almost all values quietly so as to get a value in the value
space.  You're just asking for an exception to that rule.  A
perfectly reasonable request for 1.1.  But since it's not backward
compatible, I can't predict whether the WG will consider it
important enough to make the change in 1.1.  In which case, try
for 2.0.
-- 
Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!

davep@iit.edu

Received on Wednesday, 9 March 2005 17:58:20 UTC