Re: Float to String

["John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.com>]

In article 
<mailman.85.1099945145.10401.comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org>,
 "David C. Hoos" <david.c.hoos.sr@ada95.com> wrote:

[...]
> The problem in that case was that values stored in an Oracle database
> when later extracted sometimes differed in the lsb.
> 
> What makes the problem similar is that Oracle required the data to be
> stored in decimal format.  The problem with that is that decimal numbers
> are not, in general, exactly representable in binary.  E.g. the decimal
> number 0.1 is a non-terminating binary number.

Indeed. To guarantee portability among the 90-odd Oracle platforms, 
they typically store numeric data using binary coded decimal (BCD) 
with exponent. This neatly avoids the problem of binary-decimal 
conversion.

Might the data type Interfaces.COBOL.Packed_Decimal (or something 
similar) be a useful intermediate storage format?

-- 
John
----
jmatthews at wright dot edu
www dot wright dot edu/~john.matthews/