On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 01:33:41PM -0500, Robert Haas wrote: > On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Steve Crawford > <scrawf...@pinpointresearch.com> wrote: > > Although it might cause a fair amount of backward-compatibility > > trouble, the string representation could either use NULL to > > represent a null element as is allowed in other contexts or > > require that empty-string elements be represented as "" to > > differentiate ,"", (empty-string element) from ,, (null element). > > That would cause a substantial amount of grief to people who might > not want that behavior, though. I use these functions for creating > human-readable output, not for serialization. Simple, predictable > behavior is very important.
My question boils down to, "why is this string concatenation different from all other string concatenations?" For now, the answer can be, "it behaves differently with respect to NULLs," and we just document this. We can later decide whether this behavior should change. Cheers, David. -- David Fetter <da...@fetter.org> http://fetter.org/ Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david.fet...@gmail.com iCal: webcal://www.tripit.com/feed/ical/people/david74/tripit.ics Remember to vote! Consider donating to Postgres: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers