On 06.05.24 10:53, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
On 2024-May-05, David Rowley wrote:
On Sun, 5 May 2024 at 12:41, Erik Wienhold <e...@ewie.name> wrote:
So, I think we should either remove that one nchar instance (because it
doesn't add any real value) or document it properly. The attached patch
does the latter.
It seems easier to do the former, that way we don't need to reconsider
Peter's concerns about not having enough confidence that it matches
the standard.
I've included Alvaro and Peter to see what they think.
Yeah, I too am inclined to remove it. This text was initially written
by Mantrova, Bartunov and Glukhov and posted in [1] without further
explanation, from where it was copied by Glukhov into [2]; the one I
committed is a direct derivate from that. There was no discussion about
nchar specifically that I can see, and at least I simply failed to
realize that nchar was not something that we talk about.
I'll remove it from the list, and backpatch to 16.
Yeah, makes sense to at least undocument it consistently.
If you, Erik, want to spend some time thinking through the standard
definition of NCHAR and whether we conform, perhaps we can document it
more fully.
I think the idea of NCHAR and its variants is that you could sort of
have two character sets pre-selected: One is the character set set by
the client (maybe historically ASCII) and the other is one you designate
as the "national" one. Since in PostgreSQL, a given session always has
one character set active, this is trivially true, so I think we can
leave it like that.
