Re: Implicit casts to text

Am Montag, 2. April 2007 09:17 schrieb Tom Lane:
> The scheme that was in the back of my mind was to do this at the same
> time as providing a general facility for casting *every* type to and
> from text, by means of their I/O functions if no specialized cast is
> provided in pg_cast.  This would improve functionality, thus providing
> a salve to the annoyance of users whose code the restriction breaks:
> we can certainly argue that it wouldn't do for all those automatically
> created casts to be implicit.  At the same time it'd let us eliminate
> redundant text-to/from-foo code that's currently in place for some but
> not all datatypes.

That's the first time I hear of such a scheme. Anyway, the point of this
exercise is to reduce misbehavior by explicit casting. I don't see how
implicitly adding more casting paths helps that or is even related to that.

Even if we had the automatic cast facility that you describe, and I find it
highly suspicious, such casts could at most be of the explicit category, so
how would that help users who currently rely on the implicit ones?

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/