postgresql/src/test
Tom Lane 31edbadf4a Downgrade implicit casts to text to be assignment-only, except for the ones
from the other string-category types; this eliminates a lot of surprising
interpretations that the parser could formerly make when there was no directly
applicable operator.

Create a general mechanism that supports casts to and from the standard string
types (text,varchar,bpchar) for *every* datatype, by invoking the datatype's
I/O functions.  These new casts are assignment-only in the to-string direction,
explicit-only in the other, and therefore should create no surprising behavior.
Remove a bunch of thereby-obsoleted datatype-specific casting functions.

The "general mechanism" is a new expression node type CoerceViaIO that can
actually convert between *any* two datatypes if their external text
representations are compatible.  This is more general than needed for the
immediate feature, but might be useful in plpgsql or other places in future.

This commit does nothing about the issue that applying the concatenation
operator || to non-text types will now fail, often with strange error messages
due to misinterpreting the operator as array concatenation.  Since it often
(not always) worked before, we should either make it succeed or at least give
a more user-friendly error; but details are still under debate.

Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
2007-06-05 21:31:09 +00:00
..
bench Update CVS HEAD for 2007 copyright. Back branches are typically not 2007-01-05 22:20:05 +00:00
examples Wording cleanup for error messages. Also change can't -> cannot. 2007-02-01 19:10:30 +00:00
locale $Header: -> $PostgreSQL Changes ... 2003-11-29 19:52:15 +00:00
mb Change the backend to reject strings containing invalidly-encoded multibyte 2006-05-21 20:05:21 +00:00
performance Add CVS tag lines to files that were lacking them. 2006-03-11 04:38:42 +00:00
regress Downgrade implicit casts to text to be assignment-only, except for the ones 2007-06-05 21:31:09 +00:00
thread Wording cleanup for error messages. Also change can't -> cannot. 2007-02-01 19:10:30 +00:00
Makefile $Header: -> $PostgreSQL Changes ... 2003-11-29 19:52:15 +00:00