[Bug 3250] definition of precisionDecimal

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=3250





------- Comment #2 from mike@saxonica.com  2006-05-11 09:03 -------
I think the main thrust of this point is that whereas xs:decimal refers to "the
set of numbers that can be obtained by dividing an integer by a non-negative
power of ten, i.e., expressible as i / 10n where i and n are integers and n
≥ 0", xs:precisionDecimal refers to a number of properties of the value,
one of which (the most important of which!) is simply "a decimal number", not
further elaborated.

The other part of the problem, I think, is that defining the infinite value
space doesn't aid our understanding of the semantics of the data type all that
much. We need to understand something of the mechanisms used to restrict the
value space, and of the operations that are applicable to the data type.

(There's a real procedural problem here in trying to define a data type in XML
Schema and then lobbing it over the fence to QT to define some suitable
operations. I personally have no idea how to define an arithmetic that is
sensitive to the "precision" component of these values, yet that is presumably
what QT are expected to do.)

Received on Thursday, 11 May 2006 09:03:46 UTC