Operators and Functions

I was starting to update the chapter on operators in the User's Guide but
when I arrived at the LIKE operator/function it occurred to me that the
division between functions and operators is quite unnatural.

ISTM that someone reading the User's Guide is primarily interested in
solving a problem, like "How do I mangle my text strings?", and doesn't
necessarily care whether the answer is implemented as an operator or a
function.

I'd envision merging the information into one chapter with the following
outline:

Functions and Operators
Comparison
(>, <, <>, etc.)
Arithmetic and Trigonometry
(+, -, abs, sin, ...)
Character string manipulation
(||, trim, repeat, length, etc.)
Pattern matching
(LIKE, ~)
Formatting
(to_char, ...)
Date/Time
Geometry
Network Address Type Functions and Operators
Special Conditionals
(COALESCE, NULLIF, CASE)
Miscellaneous
(CURRENT_USER, SESSION_USER)
Aggregate Functions

Lexical precedence would move into the "SQL Syntax" chapter.

Comments?

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net http://yi.org/peter-e/