nested table

This one just for fun today. An AskTOM question came in about arbitrary length arithmetic because “NUMBER(38) was not enough”. After some back-and-forth discussions it turned out that the business need under the requirement was managing bit strings. The implementation was currently converting the bits to decimals, hence the need for potentially very large number handling.

The problem was ultimately tackled with using RAW datatypes and holding the bits as raw strings, but I thought it would be interesting to throw together an addition and subtraction facility where the boundaries could exceed NUMBER(38).

So using nested tables, I had some fun with the code below.