This example wasn't updated when we changed the behavior of bpcharlen()
in 8.0, nor when we changed the number of parameters taken by the bpchar()
cast function in 7.3. Per report from lsliang.
The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
only type categories in which the previous coding made *every* type
preferred; so there is no change in effective behavior, because the function
resolution rules only do something different when faced with a choice
between preferred and non-preferred types in the same category. It just
seems safer and less surprising to have CREATE TYPE default to non-preferred
status ...
with system catalog lookups, as was foreseen to be necessary almost since
their creation. Instead put the information into two new pg_type columns,
typcategory and typispreferred. Add support for setting these when
creating a user-defined base type.
The category column is just a "char" (i.e. a poor man's enum), allowing
a crude form of user extensibility of the category list: just use an
otherwise-unused character. This seems sufficient for foreseen uses,
but we could upgrade to having an actual category catalog someday, if
there proves to be a huge demand for custom type categories.
In this patch I have attempted to hew exactly to the behavior of the
previous hardwired logic, except for introducing new type categories for
arrays, composites, and enums. In particular the default preferred state
for user-defined types remains TRUE. That seems worth revisiting, but it
should be done as a separate patch from introducing the infrastructure.
Likewise, any adjustment of the standard set of categories should be done
separately.
so long as all the trailing arguments are of the same (non-array) type.
The function receives them as a single array argument (which is why they
have to all be the same type).
It might be useful to extend this facility to aggregates, but this patch
doesn't do that.
This patch imposes a noticeable slowdown on function lookup --- a follow-on
patch will fix that by adding a redundant column to pg_proc.
Pavel Stehule
Document return type of cast functions.
Also change documentation to prefer the term "binary coercible" in its
present sense instead of the previous term "binary compatible".
to a UNION, CASE, or related construct are of the same domain type. The
main part of this routine smashes domains to their base types, which seems
necessary because the logic involves TypeCategory() and IsPreferredType(),
neither of which work usefully on domains. However, we can add a first
pass that just detects whether all the inputs are exactly the same type,
and if so accept that without question (so long as it's not UNKNOWN).
Per recent gripe from Dean Rasheed.
In passing, remove some tests for InvalidOid, which have clearly been dead
code for quite some time now, because getBaseType() would fail on that input.
Also, clarify the manual's not-very-precise description of the existing
algorithm's behavior.
from the other string-category types; this eliminates a lot of surprising
interpretations that the parser could formerly make when there was no directly
applicable operator.
Create a general mechanism that supports casts to and from the standard string
types (text,varchar,bpchar) for *every* datatype, by invoking the datatype's
I/O functions. These new casts are assignment-only in the to-string direction,
explicit-only in the other, and therefore should create no surprising behavior.
Remove a bunch of thereby-obsoleted datatype-specific casting functions.
The "general mechanism" is a new expression node type CoerceViaIO that can
actually convert between *any* two datatypes if their external text
representations are compatible. This is more general than needed for the
immediate feature, but might be useful in plpgsql or other places in future.
This commit does nothing about the issue that applying the concatenation
operator || to non-text types will now fail, often with strange error messages
due to misinterpreting the operator as array concatenation. Since it often
(not always) worked before, we should either make it succeed or at least give
a more user-friendly error; but details are still under debate.
Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Also update two error messages mentioned in the documenation to match.
blanks, in hopes of reducing the surprise factor for newbies. Remove
redundant operators for VARCHAR (it depends wholly on TEXT operations now).
Clean up resolution of ambiguous operators/functions to avoid surprising
choices for domains: domains are treated as equivalent to their base types
and binary-coercibility is no longer considered a preference item when
choosing among multiple operators/functions. IsBinaryCoercible now correctly
reflects the notion that you need *only* relabel the type to get from type
A to type B: that is, a domain is binary-coercible to its base type, but
not vice versa. Various marginal cleanup, including merging the essentially
duplicate resolution code in parse_func.c and parse_oper.c. Improve opr_sanity
regression test to understand about binary compatibility (using pg_cast),
and fix a couple of small errors in the catalogs revealed thereby.
Restructure "special operator" handling to fetch operators via index opclasses
rather than hardwiring assumptions about names (cleans up the pattern_ops
stuff a little).
- more work from the SGML police
- some grammar improvements: rewriting a paragraph or two, replacing
contractions where (IMHO) appropriate
- fix missing utility commands in lock mode docs
- improve CLUSTER, REINDEX, SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION ref pages
Neil Conway
to be flexible about assignment casts without introducing ambiguity in
operator/function resolution. Introduce a well-defined promotion hierarchy
for numeric datatypes (int2->int4->int8->numeric->float4->float8).
Change make_const to initially label numeric literals as int4, int8, or
numeric (never float8 anymore).
Explicitly mark Func and RelabelType nodes to indicate whether they came
from a function call, explicit cast, or implicit cast; use this to do
reverse-listing more accurately and without so many heuristics.
Explicit casts to char, varchar, bit, varbit will truncate or pad without
raising an error (the pre-7.2 behavior), while assigning to a column without
any explicit cast will still raise an error for wrong-length data like 7.3.
This more nearly follows the SQL spec than 7.2 behavior (we should be
reporting a 'completion condition' in the explicit-cast cases, but we have
no mechanism for that, so just do silent truncation).
Fix some problems with enforcement of typmod for array elements;
it didn't work at all in 'UPDATE ... SET array[n] = foo', for example.
Provide a generalized array_length_coerce() function to replace the
specialized per-array-type functions that used to be needed (and were
missing for NUMERIC as well as all the datetime types).
Add missing conversions int8<->float4, text<->numeric, oid<->int8.
initdb forced.
type coercion after failing to find an exact match in pg_proc, but before
considering interpretations that involve a function call with one or
more argument type coercions. This avoids surprises wherein what looks
like a type coercion is interpreted as coercing to some third type and
then to the destination type, as in Dave Blasby's bug report of 3-Oct-01.
See subsequent discussion in pghackers.
Tom Lane
Alvaro Herrera
Magnus Hagander
Peter Eisentraut
Bruce Momjian
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon