At 01:36 PM 5/9/00 -0700, David Schnepper wrote:

>
>When Chris Jewell did the 64 bit integer implementation for v6.0, initially
>we were using dtype_quad, but when it became obvious how the semantics
>changed, and the external representation wasn't appropriate, we made a new
>datatype so we wouldn't break any existing programs, and would not have
>any legacy code inside IB that thought it new how to work with "isc_quad"
>but was incorrect for int64.
>

Thanks for the jog -- it's coming back.

Rdb/ELN, written in Bliss, used the VMS RTL to do true 64 arithmetic.
C and Unix had no such hooks. To avoid very messy code, I made
stuff like blobs (which are really 2 32 bit integers) and dates
(again, two 2 32 bit integers) using a QUAD data type.

However, the SQL_QUAD type did not map into the internal QUAD
type but a true 64 bit integer. On the other hand, it didn't
get implemented in Interbase, so the incompatibility is in
spirit (and they only slightly) and not fact.

Thanks for the explanation. Back to ODBC.

Jim Starkey