RE: large and small numbers in xsl

["Arnold, Curt" <Curt dot Arnold at hyprotech dot com>]

Michael Kay wrote
> I can't get my head round what this means in practice. How would you
> represent 1e-157 for instance?

As 0.000(lots of zeroes)0001
----

Ouch, that hurts bad.  I had thought (but not actually followed up with research) that DecimalFormat might not be sufficient for scientific use, however I thought that if you were using IEEE double
precision, you must be allowing some sort of exponent term in input values.

In these ways I intend to use XSLT, I'm going to have to find a way to work around this.

I assume that means that you need to do something like define functions in Java to do your conversion and formatting, explicitly call them to perform conversions and then use XT's extension mechanism
tie the Java code to the XSLT function name.

There was a comment on the Xalan development list about starting development for embeddeding scripting.  I assume that JavaScript or VBScript would give you sufficient conversion and formatting power
and it would be more elegant than the external Java class file.

Have there been any good threads on extension mechanisms and/or numeric formatting that I have missed?


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