another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).
This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.
of the STRING type category, thereby opening up the mechanism for user-defined
types. This is mainly for the benefit of citext, though; there aren't likely
to be a lot of types that are all general-purpose character strings.
Per discussion with David Wheeler.
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".
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".
eliminating the former hard-wired convention about their names. Allow
pg_cast entries to represent both type coercion and length coercion in
a single step --- this is represented by a function that takes an
extra typmod argument, just like a length coercion function. This
nicely merges the type and length coercion mechanisms into something
at least a little cleaner than we had before. Make use of the single-
coercion-step behavior to fix integer-to-bit coercion so that coercing
to bit(n) yields the rightmost n bits of the integer instead of the
leftmost n bits. This should fix recurrent complaints about the odd
behavior of this coercion. Clean up the documentation of the bit string
functions, and try to put it where people might actually find it.
Also, get rid of the unreliable heuristics in ruleutils.c about whether
to display nested coercion steps; instead require parse_coerce.c to
label them properly in the first place.
restriction was debatable to begin with, but it has now become obvious
that it breaks forward-porting of user-defined types; contrib/lo being
the most salient example.
including:
- replacing all the appropriate usages of <citetitle>PostgreSQL
...</citetitle> with &cite-user;, &cite-admin;, and so on
- fix an omission in the EXECUTE documentation
- add some more text to the EXPLAIN documentation
- improve the PL/PgSQL RETURN NEXT documentation (more work to do here)
- minor markup fixes
Neil Conway
discussion some weeks ago. Also, add a check that two types to be
binary-equivalenced match as to typlen, typbyval, and typalign; if
they don't then it's surely a mistake to equivalence them.
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.
extension to create binary compatible casts. Includes dependency tracking
as well.
pg_proc.proimplicit is now defunct, but will be removed in a separate
commit.
pg_dump provides a migration path from the previous scheme to declare
casts. Dumping binary compatible casts is currently impossible, though.
