That sounds like a lot of words to justify an error that could be caught at parse time, that is actually never caught at all. It seems to me that whatever type is inferred from a long constant string, it won't fit into a char... At least not without casting it. And therefore an error should come out.
I thought you were trying to convince people to modify the documentation? This reads more like wanting to hack the parser to teach it forbidden knowledge.
In any case I think this email report is closed and burying any discussion about this material here just makes it harder for people to find.
From:
Chris BSomething Date: Subject:
Re: BUG #18594: CASE WHEN ELSE failing to return the expected output when the same colum is used in WHEN and ELSE
