On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> "Neil Conway" <neilc@samurai.com> writes:
>
>> Returning regtype seems like the natural choice.
>
> I was just about to say the same.
Yes. In fact, the way I typically use the function is to write
gettype(whatever)::regtype. I was too lazy to modify the function to
return regtype, and with "::regtype" weighing in at a mere 9
keystrokes there wasn't much motivation =)
> Another thought is that you might as
> well declare the input type as "any" --- using "anyelement" just causes
> the parser to waste a few cycles checking for argument/result type
> conflicts that can't exist here.
Good tip.
> I don't like gettype() as the function name: it's not particularly
> readable and it seems to infringe on application namespace. It should
> be pg_something ... maybe pg_typeof() ?
>
Sure, pg_typeof() sounds good. I only used gettype() because it was a
familiar name (PHP has an analogous builtin function called
gettype()).
> Oh, another thing: it shouldn't be STRICT. Nulls have perfectly good
> types.
>
Agreed.
Barring any further comments/objections, I'll go ahead and prepare a
patch to add this to core.
Cheers,
BJ
