from the other string-category types; this eliminates a lot of surprising
interpretations that the parser could formerly make when there was no directly
applicable operator.
Create a general mechanism that supports casts to and from the standard string
types (text,varchar,bpchar) for *every* datatype, by invoking the datatype's
I/O functions. These new casts are assignment-only in the to-string direction,
explicit-only in the other, and therefore should create no surprising behavior.
Remove a bunch of thereby-obsoleted datatype-specific casting functions.
The "general mechanism" is a new expression node type CoerceViaIO that can
actually convert between *any* two datatypes if their external text
representations are compatible. This is more general than needed for the
immediate feature, but might be useful in plpgsql or other places in future.
This commit does nothing about the issue that applying the concatenation
operator || to non-text types will now fail, often with strange error messages
due to misinterpreting the operator as array concatenation. Since it often
(not always) worked before, we should either make it succeed or at least give
a more user-friendly error; but details are still under debate.
Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
Update the calling convention for all external facing functions. By
external facing, I mean all functions that are directly referenced in
cube.sql. Prior to my update, all functions used the older V0 calling
convention. They now use V1.
New Functions:
cube(float[]), which makes a zero volume cube from a float array
cube(float[], float[]), which allows the user to create a cube from
two float arrays; one for the upper right and one for the lower left
coordinate.
cube_subset(cube, int4[]), to allow you to reorder or choose a subset of
dimensions from a cube, using index values specified in the array.
Joshua Reich
Most of the changes add the mandatory USING clause to DROP OPERATOR
CLASS statements. DROP TYPE is now DROP TYPE CASCADE; without
CASCADE a DROP TYPE fails due to the circular dependency on the
type's I/O functions. The DROP FUNCTION statements for the I/O
functions have been removed, as DROP TYPE CASCADE removes them
automatically. Patch from Michael Fuhr.
