: See the methods on FieldType, esp toExternal() It never really occured to me before, but it is kind of weird that there is a toInternal and a toExternal and an indexedToReadable -- but there is no readableToIndexed ... toInternal is used both for the "indexed" value and for the "stored" value, so things like SortableIntField wind up "storing" an encoded value even though there isn't much need for it.
In theory, indexing an "sint" field unstored and storing a corrisponding "integer" field unindex might actaully be faster then a single field since the toExternal method is a NOOP. -Hoss
