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Tom Lane 31edbadf4a Downgrade implicit casts to text to be assignment-only, except for the ones
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
2007-06-05 21:31:09 +00:00
config Better solution to the tr problem: use sed instead. Per Martijn and Andrew. 2006-11-30 22:21:24 +00:00
contrib Downgrade implicit casts to text to be assignment-only, except for the ones 2007-06-05 21:31:09 +00:00
doc Downgrade implicit casts to text to be assignment-only, except for the ones 2007-06-05 21:31:09 +00:00
src Downgrade implicit casts to text to be assignment-only, except for the ones 2007-06-05 21:31:09 +00:00
aclocal.m4 Add new auto-detection of thread flags. 2004-04-23 18:15:55 +00:00
configure Tidy overly long configure help lines. 2007-06-04 21:55:43 +00:00
configure.in Tidy overly long configure help lines. 2007-06-04 21:55:43 +00:00
COPYRIGHT Update CVS HEAD for 2007 copyright. Back branches are typically not 2007-01-05 22:20:05 +00:00
GNUmakefile.in Replace useless uses of := by = in makefiles. 2007-02-09 15:56:00 +00:00
Makefile Remove remains of old depend target. 2007-01-20 17:16:17 +00:00
README Fix spectacular misspellings of procedural language names 2006-07-24 16:55:59 +00:00
README.CVS Some further editorializing on README.CVS. 2004-03-28 06:09:08 +00:00

PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================
  
This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces including some of the more
common listed below:

C++ - http://thaiopensource.org/development/libpqxx/
JDBC - http://jdbc.postgresql.org
ODBC - http://odbc.postgresql.org
Perl - http://search.cpan.org/~dbdpg/
PHP - http://www.php.net
Python - http://www.initd.org/
Ruby - http://ruby.scripting.ca/postgres/

Other language binding are available from a variety of contributing
parties.

PostgreSQL also has a great number of procedural languages available,
a short but not complete list is below:

PL/pgSQL - included in PostgreSQL source distribution
PL/Perl - included in PostgreSQL source distribution
PL/PHP - http://projects.commandprompt.com/projects/public/plphp
PL/Python - included in PostgreSQL source distribution
PL/Java - http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/pljava/projdisplay.php
PL/Tcl - included in PostgreSQL source distribution

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
PostgreSQL.  That file also lists supported operating systems and
hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other
software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL
system.  Changes between all PostgreSQL releases are recorded in the
file HISTORY.  Copyright and license information can be found in the
file COPYRIGHT.  A comprehensive documentation set is included in this
distribution; it can be read as described in the installation
instructions.

The latest version of this software may be obtained at
http://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.