Peter Eisentraut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Is it good practice to scribble around in data type internals? Why not > text * > hello() > { > return textin("hello world"); > } Well, he could do that if he wanted, but that doesn't teach him anything about how to prepare his own datatype, which I suppose is the real point of the exercise. (Actually, the above code will be *less* portable to 7.1 than the other version, because the calling convention of textin() changed ...) regards, tom lane