On 04/02/2013 02:46 PM, Florian Pflug wrote:
On Apr1, 2013, at 13:43 , Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think the current behavior is broken. I found it
counterintuitive at first, but then I got used to it. It's reasonably
self-consistent: arrays can't have empty dimensions, therefore the
empty array is unique and dimensionless. Is that the behavior I would
have picked if I had designed the type? No, it isn't. I wouldn't
have tried to support one-dimensional arrays and multi-dimensional
arrays in the same data type either, nor would I have supported
non-default lower bounds. But all of those ships have sailed, and the
time to change them is not after people have spent 10 years building
applications that work with the current behavior. If we want to
introduce a new type with different, perhaps better, behavior, well, I
think that might be a fine idea. But I *don't* think imposing a hard
compatibility break on users of arrays is a good idea.
+1.
Especially since having infinitely many variants of "empty" is IMHO
hardly an improvement over the existing situation.
If we're going to break compatibility, we should IMHO get rid of
non-zero lower bounds all together. My guess is that the number of
affected users wouldn't be much higher than for the proposed patch,
and it'd allow lossless mapping to most language's native array types…
That would actually break a HUGE number of users, since the default
lower bound is 1. I have seen any number of pieces if code that rely on
that.
Doesn't the standard have something to say about all this?
cheers
andrew
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