On 1/10/14, 4:14 PM, Merlin Moncure wrote:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Jeff Janes <[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:26 PM, Jim Nasby <[email protected]> wrote:
On 1/9/14, 10:58 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
Jim Nasby <[email protected]> writes:
ISTM that allowing users to pick arbitrary lower array bounds was a huge
mistake. I've never seen anyone make use of it, can't think of any
legitimate use cases for it, and hate the stupendous amount of extra code
needed to deal with it.
You lack imagination, sir.
Considering what you'd normally want to do in SQL, the only example I can
think of is to not have the argument over 0 vs 1 based.
Actually, I was thinking there might be some computational problems where
changing lower bound would be nice, but then again, what other languages
actually support this?
Perl does, though they regret it bitterly.
What does it matter? Our arrays have had the capability for years and
years and "because it's cleaner" is simply not justification to break
people's applications. Why are we even considering this?
Because it's a foot-gun. So far no one has given a legitimate use case for it
and supporting it *greatly* complicates iterating over arrays.
Also, just to be clear, I'd be fine with offering a better alternative and
leaving existing arrays alone. I don't see any easy way to do that, but maybe
someone's got a good idea on that.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Data Architect [email protected]
512.569.9461 (cell) http://jim.nasby.net
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