On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 2:09 AM, Jeff Davis <pg...@j-davis.com> wrote: > On Thu, 2011-06-30 at 12:28 +0200, Florian Pflug wrote: >> Well, arrays are containers, and we need two values to construct a range, > > What about empty ranges? What about infinite ranges? > > It seems quite a bit more awkward to shoehorn ranges into an array than > to use a real type (even if it's intermediate and otherwise useless). > >> Hm, I guess. I'm sill no huge fan of RANGEINPUT, but if we prevent >> it from being used as a column type and from being used as an argument >> type, then I guess it's workable... >> >> Btw, what happened to the idea of making RANGE(...) a special syntactic >> construct instead of a normal function call? Did we discard that for its >> intrusiveness, or were there other reasons? > > It has not been discarded; as far as I'm concerned it's still on the > table. The main advantage is that it doesn't require an intermediate > type, and that requiring a cast (or some specification of the range > type) might be a little more natural. The downside is that, well, it's > new syntax, and there's a little inertia there. > > But if it's actually better, we should do it. If an intermediate type > seems to be problematic, or if people think it's strange to require > casting, then I think this is reasonable.
I don't understand how the bespoke syntax avoids the need for a cast? -- 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
