Re: Money casting too liberal?

On Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:46:40 -0400
Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Well, this has been discussed before, and the majority view every
> time has been that MONEY is a legacy thing that most people would
> rather rip out than sink a large amount of additional effort into.
> It has some use-cases but they are narrow, and it's not clear how
> much wider the use-cases would be if we tried to generalize it.

I wonder if our vision isn't a little tunneled here. Using this type
for money is, perhaps, a specialized use and the type should really be
called something else and modified to remove all connotations of money
from it. So...

- Drop the currency symbol
- Allow number of decimals to be defined once for the column
- Don't use locale except to specify decimal separator (',' vs. '.')
- Allow operations against numeric

Not sure what to rename it to. Decimal would be good if it wasn't
already in use. Maybe DecimalInt.

> My own experience with this sort of thing leads me to think that
> real applications dealing with a variety of currencies will be
> needing to store additional details, such as the exact exchange
> rate that applied to a particular transaction. So while merely

Seems like something that can be stored in a different column.

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