On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 7:37 AM, Itagaki Takahiro <itagaki.takah...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 7:29 AM, Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> No doubt. The problem is that we're going to end up with those bells >> and whistles in two places: in to_char or other type-specific >> formatting functions, and again in format. > > If we decide to use C-like sprintf(), I think the only thing we can do > is to implement C-syntax as much as possible. Users will expect the > function behaves as sprintf, because it has the similar syntax. > It's not an item for now, but someone would request it at a future date. > > > BTW, the interoperability is why I proposed {} syntax. For example, > {1:YYYY-MM-DD} for date is expanded to to_char($1, 'YYYY-MM-DD'). > (Maybe it's not so easy; It requires function lookups depending on types.)
There's no particular reason why we couldn't make this work with sprintf-type syntax; for example, you could allow %{XYZ} to mean to_char(value, 'XYZ'). But it seems to me that we have agreement that this should start with just %s, %I, %L and allow 3$ or similar in the middle to specify which argument it is. We can then argue about how many more bells and whistles to add later. I would like to bounce this back for rework along the lines described above and ask for a resubmit to the next CF. We are out of time to consider this further for this CF, and clearly it's not ready to go ATM. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers