Re: [PATCH] Exorcise "zero-dimensional" arrays (Was: Re: Should array_length() Return NULL) - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 04/04/13 04:58, Pavel Stehule wrote:

2013/4/3 Gavin Flower <GavinFlower@archidevsys.co.nz>

On 04/04/13 03:02, Florian Pflug wrote:

On Apr3, 2013, at 15:30 , Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:

On 04/02/2013 02:46 PM, Florian Pflug wrote:

If we're going to break compatibility, we should IMHO get rid of
non-zero lower bounds all together. My guess is that the number of
affected users wouldn't be much higher than for the proposed patch,
and it'd allow lossless mapping to most language's native array types…

That would actually break a HUGE number of users, since the default lower
bound is 1. I have seen any number of pieces if code that rely on that.

Uh, yeah, we should make it 1 then, not 0, then. As long as the bound
is fixed, conversion to native C/Java/Ruby/Python/... arrays would still
be lossless.

best regards,
Florian Pflug

Zero as the default lower bound is consistent with most languages (especially the common ones like C, C++, Java, & Python), in fact I don't remember any language where that is not the case (ignoring SQL) - and I've written programs in about 20 languages.

pascal, ADA, and ALGOL like languages

Regards

Pavel

ALOGOL 60 was zero based by default, as I remember deliberately setting the lower bound to 1, I managed to avoid PASCAL and I only glanced at ADA.

Cheers,
Gavin