On Thursday, October 16, 2025, Sergei Katkovsky <
skatkovsky@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't understand why any of these variants are better than the
> original wording "blank-padded". That has the non-negligible
> advantage of corresponding to the type name, and furthermore
> appears in many other places in our docs and source code.
The wording for BPCHAR (not to be confused with BPCHAR(N) is already
"blank-trimming", not "blank-padded". And "blank-padded" is probably
the least correct wording variant for BPCHAR, because this type has
unlimited length and it's impossible to pad to the infinity.
A given value has a finite length and there is just no restriction on what that length is. All trailing spaces in the input are considered padding for purposes of comparison i.e., manually padding is added by the user as opposed to the system.
So bpchar(n) is automatically blank padded to a total length for a value of n characters. bpchar also has padding blanks but they must be manually inserted during value creation.
I would leave the note of blank-padded for both and just point out the automatic vs manual distinction.
David J.
