Oops, I though Ken had written privately to me - here's my reply:
(From the Booost rational package - http://www.boost.org/libs/
rational/rational.html)
I'd try to link to an existing library that provides rationals, or
model my code closely after one.
Yes, it may be easy to create composite type but the operands would
still be needed.
Select n FROM t WHERE frac1 < frac2;
John, do you how compatible the Booost license is (or can be
made :-) with PG, in the case where adding this to the server as a
standard datum-type might be very useful (for me anyway).
I was just using the Boost rational package as an example, mostly to
quote those implementation comments from the docs. Boost is a set of
C++ libraries, PG is C, so no direct adoption possible.
However, I think the Boost license is essentially BSD-like, so it
might be possible to steal the algorithms pretty easily. I haven't
looked, but I would be surprised if there was much OOP in the
rational code, it might be fairly trivial to "dumb it down" to C.
- John D. Burger
MITRE
