Re: [PATCHES] [BUGS] BUG #2846: inconsistent and confusing

Roman Kononov wrote:
> On 12/27/2006 05:19 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Roman Kononov <kononov195-pgsql@yahoo.com> writes:
> >> On 12/27/2006 03:23 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> >>> Are you sure?  As I remember, computation automatically upgrades to
> >>> 'double'.  See this program and output:
> >
> >> This is platform- and compiler- dependent:
> >
> > ... and probably irrelevant, too.  We should store the result into a
> > float4 variable and then test for isinf() on that; that eliminates the
> > question of whether the compiler did the multiply in a wider format or
> > not.
>
> You are right provided that you want to ignore underflows and silently
> produce zeros instead.
>
> If you go this way, I recommend to ignore overflows as well, and silently
> produce infinities and NaNs.

While IEEE seems fine with that, I don't think this is good for SQL.  It
is best to produce a meaningful error.  The major issue is that our
current code is buggy because it doesn't have consistent behavior, as
Roman outlined.

--
  Bruce Momjian   bruce@momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB    http://www.enterprisedb.com

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