John Havard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Is there anyway to do this without having to resort to writing the > functions in C or some other language? You really cannot write datatype I/O functions in anything but C, because the I/O functions have to deal in C-style strings, which are not a SQL datatype; so there is no way to describe the necessary behavior in any PL language. There has been some talk of promoting "C string" to be at least a second-class SQL datatype (on the order of being able to declare functions that take or return them, but not use them as a column datatype). Hasn't happened yet though. > Why doesn't CREATE FUNCTION complain about plpgsql functions not being > able to accept the opaque type as an argument? Because it makes no assumptions about what abilities PL languages might have. The PLs are plug-ins, remember. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly