Tom Lane wrote, On 2015-05-14 03:05:
> Agreed; I think the reason why we disallow this case is not so much
> string literals as numeric literals. It would be an even bigger POLA
> violation if "ORDER BY 1" and "ORDER BY 1.0" were both accepted and did
> fundamentally different things.
If that helps, I don't think of that as violating the POLA
significantly. This is IMO a much worse violation:
=$ WITH test AS (SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 0) SELECT * FROM test ORDER BY 1;
?column?
----------
0
1
(2 rows)
=$ WITH test AS (SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 0) SELECT * FROM test ORDER
BY 1::integer;
?column?
----------
1
0
(2 rows)
especially since the latter ORDER BY clause is more likely to be the
result of a dumb automatic query generator that appends types to every
expression. But I, as an user, understand and accept that appending a
type changes the meaning of the ORDER BY.
