one thing I found is that all FLOAT (and probably DOUBLE) values are returned as string

That does make a certain amount of sense.

If you converted floats to their binary numeric representation, then you could introduce typical floating point representation errors. If you are going to do math with them in your perl code, then that will happen anyway and you'd have to deal with it.

But if you are only going to display them, or store them into another table somewhere, then returning them as strings means that you don't have to deal with those errors.

Whether that is the reasoning behind it I cannot say, but it could be.

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

In reply to Re^5: Reading (the same) data in different ways & memory usage by BrowserUk
in thread Reading (the same) data in different ways & memory usage by Neighbour

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