"Simon Riggs" <simon@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> On Thu, 2008-07-03 at 14:11 +0300, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
>
>> > What I'd like it to do is to recognise that the 0 should be cast
>> > implicitly to another datatype within the same family. I want and expect
>> > nvl(char_column, 0)
>> > to fail, but I expect the various numeric/integer types we have to play
>> > nicely together without tears.
>>
>> So, it would be analogous to the 'unknown' type, but for numeric
>> literals instead of text literals. Seems reasonable. It still wouldn't
>> allow nvl(1::bigint, 2::int4), though, just as the unknown type doesn't
>> help with nvl('foo'::text, 'bar'::varchar).
>
> Well, it would be nice if we could work with the unknown type also, but
> I don't expect that's meaningful.
Postgres's way of spelling constants of unknown type is to put them in single
quotes. That is, 'foo' isn't a character string in Postgres, it's *any* kind
of constant with an unknown type. So this would work:
nvl(numeric_column, '0')
I think what you're suggesting is making integer and floating point constants
like 0 and 0.1 be treated as "unknown" or perhaps a different kind of unknown,
"unknown integral type" and "unknown numeric type".
Personally I think the way it works now is weird too, but it's been that way
forever and changing it would be a pretty massive behaviour change.
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