I know that the money type is supposed to be deprecated but I think that
there is still some benefit to it. It is small and fast. There are some
problems and I would like to address them.
The output has a dollar sign attached. This is NA centric and we said years
ago that we were going to drop it. I think that that is enough warning.
Unless someone has a problem with that I will just go in and get rid of it.
Also somewhat NA centric is the two decimal places. This was originally
meant to be locale driven but that is a problem for other reasons. What
about defaulting it to two decimal places but allowing it to be redefined at
table creation time? How hard would it be to make it accept an optional
precision?
It doesn't cast to other types. If it simply cast to float that would allow
it to be more flexible. Do I need to add a float return function for that to
work?
Limited precision. This can be fixed by going to a 64 bit integer for the
underlying type. Are we at a point where we can do that yet? I am afraid
that there are still systems that don't have a native 64 bit type. This is
not as critical as the other items I think.
As the original author of the type I naturally have some bias but I still
think that it is a good type for all the reasons we thought it was a good
idea before. There is a definite advantage to being able to do integer
arithmetic right on the CPU in large financial applications.
--
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@{druid|vex}.net> | Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on
+1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.
