Re: RfD: more powerful "any" types

On Thu, 2009-09-10 at 21:35 +0200, Pavel Stehule wrote:
> 2009/9/10 Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>:
> > Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> >> I don't afraid about crashing. Simply I have not idea what sql
> >> sprintf's behave in case:
> >
> >> SELECT sprintf('some %s', 10)
> >
> > That one I don't think is hard --- coerce the input type to text and
> > print the string.
> >
> >> SELECT sprintf('some %d', 10::mycustomtype)
> >
> > For the formats that presume an integer or float input in C, perhaps
> > we could coerce to numeric (failing if that fails) and then print
> > appropriately. Or maybe int or float8 would be more appropriate
> > conversion targets.
>
> it's possible - so format tags doesn't mean data type, but it means
> "try to drow it as type" - etc invisible explicit casting.

what is the difference between these two ?

> It could work, but it doesn't look like SQL.

but we do it all over the place if another type is needed and CAST
exists for getting it

--
Hannu Krosing http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Scalability and Availability
Services, Consulting and Training