Re: Fixed Point Arithmetic
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 00:06:37 GMT
Message-ID: <hChPh.1197$DE1.191_at_pd7urf2no>
Bob Badour wrote:
> David Cressey wrote:
>
>> "Gene Wirchenko" <genew_at_ocis.net> wrote in message >> news:58rn03pspoga5r87b0v632b4tmug00gq7f_at_4ax.com... >> >>> "David Cressey" <cressey73_at_verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
> [snip]
>
>>>> Are fixed point numbers a useful from for DBMSes to support? >>> >>> >>> Of course, since they often deal with such numbers. Currency >>> amounts are almost certainly the most common example. >> >> >> Thanks. I really liked Oracle's Number (X,2) when I first saw it. And I >> don't really care if the arithmetic is a little slow, as long as it's >> right. >> >> If you're doing some heavy duty arithmetic, like interplanetary >> trajectory >> calculations, don't use the facilities of a DBMS. And learn what you're >> doing before doing it.
>
>
> Why not? It seems to me that the data for a large number of satellites
> is data one needs to manage, and even our little solar system has
> thousands of potentially significant satellites.
I think that eons ago (must admit I'm not really sure how many years an eon has in it, or even if it's an integral number of years) the same people who were using their ten fingers to count at the same time as they gazed at the stars, should have thought twice about this bloody decimal system. Maybe it should have occurred to them that their highly advanced twentieth-century descendents might put two and two together in vacuum valves, diodes and transistors. Of course they might say that the second generation screwed things up.
Maybe my math is naive, but still I've never been able to see that any single choice of base, no matter how many digits of either base is used, could calculate the orbits precisely, exactly, for any two satellites.
p Received on Sat Mar 31 2007 - 02:06:37 CEST