On Jan9, 2014, at 23:26 , Jim Nasby <j...@nasby.net> wrote: > On 1/9/14, 11:08 AM, Marko Tiikkaja wrote: >> On 1/9/14 5:44 PM, Florian Pflug wrote: >>> On Jan9, 2014, at 14:57 , Dean Rasheed <dean.a.rash...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> On 19 December 2013 08:05, Pavel Stehule <pavel.steh...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>>> length should be irrelevant to fact so array starts from 1, 0 or anything >>>>> else >>>> >>>> Yes, this should just return the number of elements, and 0 for an empty >>>> array. >>> >>> +1. Anything that complains about arrays whose lower bound isn't 1 really >>> needs a *way* less generic name than array_length(). >> >> Problem is, if you're operating on an array which could have a lower bound >> that isn't 1, why would you look at the length in the first place? You >> can't access any elements by index, you'd need to look at array_lower(). >> You can't iterate over the array by index, you'd need to do array_lower() >> .. array_lower() + array_length(), which doesn't make sense. And then >> there's the myriad of stuff you can do with unnest() without actually having >> to look at the length. Same goes for multi-dimensional arrays: you have >> even less things you can do there with only a length. >> >> So if we give up these constraints, we also make this function completely >> useless. > > I'm generally opposed to creating code that doesn't support the full > featureset of something (in this case, array_lower()<>1). But in this case I > hope we can all agree that allowing the user to set an arbitrary array lower > bound was an enormous mistake.
No doubt. > While we might not be able to ever completely remove that behavior, I find > the idea of throwing an error to be highly enticing. > > Plus, as Marko said, this function is pretty useless for non-1-based arrays. That I doubt, but... > I do agree that the name is probably too generic for this though. this one is actually my main complaint. The name needs to very clearly mark such a function as dealing only with a subset of all possible arrays. Otherwise we'll just add to the confusion, not avoid it. best regards, Florian Pflug -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
