On Monday, December 2, 2024, PG Bug reporting form <
noreply@postgresql.org> wrote:
The following bug has been logged on the website:
Bug reference: 18730
Logged by: Nat Makarevitch
Email address: nat@makarevitch.org
PostgreSQL version: 17.2
Operating system: Linux
Description:
BEWARE: there isn't any space between '=' and '-':
select * from test_smallint where smint!=-2;
ERROR: operator does not exist: smallint !=- integer
LINE 1: select * from test_smallint where smint!=-2;
^
HINT: No operator matches the given name and argument types. You might need
to add explicit type casts.
The operator !=- is allowed per [1], since it contains !, so the parser captures the - as per of the operator as opposed to leaving - as a break character.
Isn't the operator "!=" theoritically "an alias, which is converted to <> at
a very early stage of parsing" (as per
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/functions-comparison.html )?
The != operator and !=- operators are two different operators. Only the former is converted to <>, and not any symbol subsequence of those two characters.
David J.
