Ron Mayer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Oh.  I wasn't proposing 8601-only.  Just the one-character
> shorthands like '1Y1M'::interval that postgresql interprets
> as "1 year one minute".   No standard specifies anything close
> to that; and any similar standards ask to interpret that M as
> months instead of minutes.

Hmmm.  I would say that the problem with that is not that it's
nonstandard but that it's ambiguous.  Our documentation about the
interval type says:

  interval values can be written with the following syntax:

    [EMAIL PROTECTED] quantity unit [quantity unit...] [direction]

  Where: quantity is a number (possibly signed); unit is microsecond,
  millisecond, second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade,
  century, millennium, or abbreviations or plurals of these units;
  direction can be ago or empty. The at sign (@) is optional noise. The
  amounts of different units are implicitly added up with appropriate
  sign accounting. ago negates all the fields.

There isn't anything there that would suggest to a user that 'm' is
well-defined as a unit, much less that it specifically means "minute"
rather than one of the other options.  What if we just tweak the code to
reject ambiguous abbreviations?

[ experiments a bit... ]  Another interesting point is that "mo",
which is a perfectly unique abbreviation, is rejected.  Seems like
the handling of abbreviations in this code could be improved.

                        regards, tom lane

-- 
Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers

Reply via email to