I agree generally that if you can afford the cycles to serialize and deserialize from decimal ASCII ("0.2") that you can probably afford to use a decimal numeri

I agree generally that if you can afford the cycles to serialize and deserialize from decimal ASCII ("0.2") that you can probably afford to use a decimal numeric type in your business logic. Personally I blame the C standard for not splitting strtod in to 1 parsing function (returning an integer and the power of ten), and 1 computation/conversion function. Without this you're basically hosed with respect to locales.