Re: WIP: to_char, support for EEEE format

2009/7/30 Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>:
> Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com> writes:
>> 2009/7/30 Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>:
>>> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Brendan Jurd<direvus@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hmm. For what it's worth, I think Pavel makes a good point about the
>>>> number of exponent digits -- a large chunk of the use case for numeric
>>>> formatting would be fixed-width reporting.
>
> +1.  If you aren't trying to get the format exactly so, it's not clear
> why you're bothering with to_char() at all.
>
>> Maybe we should to support some modificator like Large EEEE - LEEEE or EEEEE
>
> Five (or more?) E's seems like a natural extension to me.  However, that
> still leaves us with the question of what to do when the exponent
> doesn't fit in however many digits we'd like to print.  Seems like the
> options are
>        * print #'s
>        * force the output wider
>        * throw an error
> None of these are very nice, but the first two could cause problems that
> you don't find out until it's too late to fix.  What about throwing an
> error?

I thing, so Oracle raise error. But I don't thing, so it is necessary
repeat all Oracle the behave - mainly when is maybe not too much
practical.

* print #s, and force the output wider has one disadvantage - it
cannot put clean signal about data problem in development time, maybe
we should to add raise warning.

* throw an error should to break "bad" written application in
production, when is too late too. So anybody should have not complete
test data set and there are a problem.

I prefer print # with raising an warning.

Pavel


>
> Sorry if this was already covered in the thread, but: anybody know what
> Oracle does for this?
>
>                        regards, tom lane
>