On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 09:06, Stephan Szabo wrote:
> On Fri, 20 May 2005, John D. Burger wrote:
>
> > I find all these statements about the near-uselessness of
> > NUMERIC^NUMERIC to be pretty amazing. It's fine to say, "no one seems
> > to be asking for this, so we haven't implemented it yet", but, c'mon,
> > folks, Postgres gets used for more than "business cases".
>
> If people don't see the use of a function they aren't going to implement
> it. In addition, there is a small, but non-zero cost to adding a
> function/operator to the system (in the cost to maintain it at the very
> least) and if the general belief is that the function or operator is
> useless or nearly useless then it simply may not be worth adding.
A couple of points.
1: How much time has been expended in the last 5 or so years
"maintaining" the floating point exponentiation operator? Seriously. I
doubt any work has gone into maintaining it. I don't mean bug fixes. I
mean touching its code because something else changed, and therefore the
fp exponent code was affected. If someone has had to do something to
maintain it, I'd certainly welcome hearing from them. My guess is that
the total amount of time that's gone into maintaining the FP version of
this operator is zero, or nearly so, and, if implemented, the amount of
time that will go into maintaining will be the same, zero, or, very
nearly so.
I could be wrong, and would be unoffended to be proven so, but I don't
think I am. I think that argument is just hand waving.
2: How many people who DO work with large exponents and need arbitrary
precision have looked at postgresql, typed in "select 3^100" got back
5.15377520732011e+47, and simply went to another piece of software and
never looked back? We don't know. And the attitude that it seems
useless to me so it must be useless to everybody else isn't going to
help attract people who do things that seem esoteric and strange to you,
but are important to them.
3: Is this worth submitting a patch for? I don't want to spend x hours
making a patch and 10x hours arguing over getting it accepted... :)