Tom Lane 31edbadf4a Downgrade implicit casts to text to be assignment-only, except for the ones ... 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		2007-06-05 21:31:09 +00:00
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cube.sql	Downgrade implicit casts to text to be assignment-only, except for the ones	2007-06-05 21:31:09 +00:00