Re: Natural keys vs Aritficial Keys

paul c wrote:

Bob Badour wrote:

paul c wrote:

...

Sure it can, as long as you count things in fifths or tenths. I once worked with a product that measured distances in 2032nds of an inch so that a 16th of an inch and a millimeter were each an integer multiple of the base unit.

I hate to mention international standards when Celko might be lurking around to take the point off into the wild blue yonder but in this case I have say that such a system would inevitably be living in an ivory tower when it was decided by some pretty big bodies years ago that for purposes of comparison, database data exchange or not, a millimeter equals 0.03937 inches, period, full stop.

No problem, just measure everything 100,000ths of an inch. ;)


So any system that tries to handle both millimeters and inches without fixed-point decimal hardware will need to include elaborate, intricate software algorithms to do elementary arithmetic. To me, this is totally stupid but is perhaps another example of your point that regression is more present than progress. The countless hours IEEE has spent on floating-point binary amazes me, the only explanation I can think of is that humans are more comfortable studying what they are familiar with not what they aren't, which seems crazy, it's only the occasional human who has the temerity to study what he doesn't know.

IEEE is a bunch of engineers. Engineers use scientific notation all the time, which is basically what floating-point binary is.
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