> It doesn't seem obvious to me that non-technical users will make
> the assumption that phone numbers, social security numbers, passwords,
> etc. that are numeric should be stored in something called 'string'
> if they are going to need to keep leading zeros.
It doesn't need to be that obvious to be usable :-)))
If users can't imagine or deduct it from a simple try, they
probably won't do anything usefull with a database program :-)))))
> Seems to me to be much more PalmOS friendly to keep whatever the
> user types just the way they type it.
Not a the point to transform the way an integer is stored.
Say the leading "0" is kept, you have to internally store the
number in a string, for the integer type in whatever language you
choose discard all leading zeros. Then you get some problems : each
time you want to compute with the number you have to convert it,
with performances consequences (great), you get size problems (same
than dimensionning a string field), etc... You could say, well, store
it as both the integer, and the way it has been entered, but that
leaves the sizing problem, at the cost of a bigger database.
Fab.
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