Re: Reduce NUMERIC size by 2 bytes, reduce max length to 508

Tom Lane wrote:

> Hm ... between that, the possible crypto connection, and John's 
> personal
> testimony that he actually uses PG for calculations in this range, I'm
> starting to lean to the idea that we shouldn't cut the range.

Just to be clear, this John has yet to use NUMERIC for any 
calculations, let alone in that range.  (I've only used NUMERIC for 
importing real-valued data where I didn't want to lose precision with a 
floating point representation, for instance, decimal latitude-longitude 
values.)

There was this post, though:

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> I've hesitated commenting, because I think it might be a silly reason,
> but perhaps it's one other people share.  ...  I use PG as a
> calculator for big numbers because it's the only user friendly thing
> on my system that can do factorial(300) - factorial(280). I'd rather
> use something like octave, but I've found its pretty easy to escape
> its range.   If the range for computation is changed, then I'll
> probably keep an old copy around just for this, though I'm not quite
> sure how much I'd be affected..

- John D. Burger  MITRE