Re: Disallow arrays with non-standard lower bounds

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
Cc: Merlin Moncure <mmoncure(at)gmail(dot)com>, David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org>, Jim Nasby <jim(at)nasby(dot)net>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Disallow arrays with non-standard lower bounds
Date: 2014-01-14 00:34:17
Message-ID: 23888.1389659657@sss.pgh.pa.us
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Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> So I guess the question is: Is it worth all that hassle to remove a
> misfeature you have to go out of your way to use? Is support for non-1
> lower bounds stopping us from doing something useful and important? Or
> is it just an irritation that it exists?

I think the argument really is that some people don't want to make their
application code work with such cases (which is fine) so they'd like an
inside-the-database guarantee that the app code won't ever see such cases.
Which is less fine, ISTM: if you fear some part of your app might be
generating such arrays, then you don't have such little use for the
feature after all, eh?

This is being camouflaged in a whole lot of utter BS about how nobody
could possibly be using the feature, nobody *should* want it, it's outside
the standard, etc etc. If we ripped out every feature being used by less
than 10% of the user base, we'd have a much smaller and more maintainable
system, for sure ... but we'd probably piss off upwards of 90% of the
user base by doing that. Your useless frammish is the next man's killer
feature.

regards, tom lane

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