Re: factorial doc bug?

Thomas Lockhart <lockhart(at)fourpalms(dot)org> writes:
> ... Tom Lane is
> probably the person who made those changes, and we should have him in
> the discussion on whether the current behavior is appropriate.

> Keep in mind that he is a mathematician, and I'll guess that he won't
> have much patience with folks who expect a result for a factorial of a
> fractional number ;)

Actually, I'm an engineer by training, not a mathematician --- either
camp will tell you there's a big difference ;-)

I have no objection to adding a "float8 !" operator using the
gamma-based definition, if someone felt like doing it. But even if we
did, that would not fix the example in typeconv.sgml; indeed it would
render the example completely wrong with respect to the point it was
originally written to make. We need an operator that exists only for
int4 to demonstrate implicit coercion. Unfortunately, I see no
candidate for one in the current catalogs. Has anyone got another idea
about how to replace this example with a correct one?

regards, tom lane