Sender: tgl@mythos.jpl.nasa.gov
Message-ID: <36963179.A6E79098@alumni.caltech.edu>
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 1999 16:25:29 +0000
From: "Thomas G. Lockhart" <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu>
Organization: Caltech/JPL
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Byron Nikolaidis <byronn@insightdist.com>
CC: bill@hammondgroves.com,
	"pgsql-interfaces@hub.org" <pgsql-interfaces@hub.org>,
	"Ken J. Wright" <ken@ori-ind.com>
Subject: Re: Money type mapping to backend
References: <199901081135.GAB79140@osage.gate.net>
	<3696251B.CAC64C1A@insightdist.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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> Hey, guess what, I was testing the whole time under Postgres 6.3 and 
> it does not require the quotes around money type!
> Only postgres 6.4 requires the quotes!
> That seems kind of weird.  Anyone got any comments?

That is a result of the "improvements" to the type coersion and
conversion I made for v6.4. The money type never had a full set of
explicit conversion functions to and from other types, but the old type
coersion/conversion scheme, which could only handle constants, would
brute-force convert the input value to a string and then try shoving it
through the target type input routine.

The new scheme can work with constants, columns, and expressions, but
there appears to be a hole in the available conversion functions for the
money type.

otoh, with the NUMERIC() and DECIMAL() types implemented by Jan, the
money type is completely and absolutely obsolete in the next release
afaik. Once we get these new types working on all platforms (I've got
troubles on my linux box; anyone else have success on non-BSD machines?)
we can think about a migration/compatibility strategy...

                   - Tom