Ability to represent floating point numbers

Overview

At the moment we have (using a Python as a platform example but it’s similar in other languages):

• integer -> int (Python)
• number -> decimal.Decimal (Python) - guaranteed to have 100% precision

We don’t have a type to represent numbers when it’s ok to lose some precision in favor of calculation speed. Decimals are really slow in Python/JavaScript/etc

Here is a root issue with benchmarking - https://github.com/frictionlessdata/frictionless-py/issues/461

[rufuspollock]

@roll i’d prefer doing the simplest thing possible at present and use format on number and have a small set of recommended supported values e.g. the classic float, double etc but allow given community to add whatever agreed values they want. You could even hack decimal places into this to start with by doing decimalPlaces2, decimalPlaces3 etc.

@roll i’m happy with you to run with a recommendation on this one and trial into the frictionless framework and if you have something working well for us to “standardize” as it were.

[dafeder]

We may be trying to solve too many problems at once here, and there may be a reason so many standards just avoid dealing with this problem, but that doesn’t exactly help people who need to represent something specific like currency that has two decimal places. If we wanted to just address the decimal problem, it could be with a new constraint of scale or something similar. IE maxLength of 12 but scale of 2 means you can have a number with 12 total digits, two of which are to the right of the decimal. This seems consistent with both python’s decimal module and how decimal types are implemented in most SQL systems. To be closer to SQL we could use precision instead of maxLength but maxLength already exists and the two seem redundant.

Another solution I’ve seen suggested is "multipleOf": 0.01. But I can’t say I love that 😃