On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 11:08 AM, Marko Tiikkaja <ma...@joh.to> 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.
I'm piling on: it's not clear at all to me why you've special cased this to lower_bound=1. First of all, there are other reasons to check length than iteration. If you want your code to blow up with non 1 based array, that should be checked in userland I think (perhaps with a constraint); the server API function should implement as many reasonable behaviors as possible. merlin -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
