On Sun, 2011-06-26 at 13:45 +0100, Greg Stark wrote: > On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Jeff Davis <pg...@j-davis.com> wrote: > > * it needs to know the result type of that function, which might not be > > the subtype (for instance, for timestamp the difference type would be > > interval) > > What's the use case for the length() function? Is it for users to be > able to display useful information about their ranges? Or is it for > implementing things like GIST indexes?
Here I was talking about something for logical use, not GiST. It's pretty common to want to know how long a range is. > For the latter a length function that always returns a float might be > more useful. Even if it isn't guaranteed to always be perfectly > precise, that is if ranges of similar length sometimes returned > identical values, at least it could be used for things like penalty(). I already have a function like that. It's actually a function that takes the subtype and returns a float, and the GiST code does the subtraction. But you're right, I could have a length function that always returns a float instead, and that would do the job. Do you see an advantage? If I had a length function that returned the subtype, I wouldn't need that. Except for those pesky types like timestamp -- because then, even if I had a length() function, I'd also need a total order on the "interval" type. Regards, Jeff Davis -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers