Rowland Shaw wrote:
Maybe I'm being really dumb here, but what is the difference between a
decimal number and a floating point number?
Decimals are potentially infinite precision decimal numbers. Minimum precision
is 18 decimal digits. This means that 0.444 and 0.666 are exactly represented
as decimals, even though their floating point representations are approximate.
From the Schema spec:
3.2.3 decimal
[Definition:] decimal represents a subset of the real numbers, which can be represented by
decimal numerals. The ·value space· of decimal is the set of numbers that can be
obtained by multiplying an integer by a non-positive power of ten, i.e., expressible as i ×
10^-n where i and n are integers and n >= 0.