> On 04 Mar 2016, at 20:59, David G. Johnston <david.g.johns...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> It would be nice if you'd follow the list convention of bottom-posting. Not
> doing that is much more annoying than the omission of version and o/s -
> especially the later since PostgreSQL purports to be generally o/s agnostic.
>
>>> On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 12:17 PM, Alex Ignatov <a.igna...@postgrespro.ru>
>>> wrote:
>>> Hello!
>>> Why string literal like 'Hello world!' doesnt automagicaly cast to text
>>> type?
>>>
>>>
>>> But why we don't have this type cast by default in Postgres? Is there any
>>> fundamental restriction on that or there is some reasons for that?
>
>
>> On Friday, March 4, 2016, Melvin Davidson <melvin6...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Probably because pg_typeof() returns the OID of a COLUMN in a table def..
>> Strings literals do not have oid's.
>>
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/interactive/functions-info.html
>>
>> "pg_typeof returns the OID of the data type of the value that is passed to
>> it. This can be helpful for troubleshooting or dynamically constructing SQL
>> queries. The function is declared as returning regtype, which is an OID
>> alias type (see Section 8.18); this means that it is the same as an OID for
>> comparison purposes but displays as a type name. For example:"
>
> While true this doesn't actually answer the question - that being what's the
> motiviation for not implicitly casting away from unknown. I suspect that the
> main reason is that in an extensible system like PostgreSQL it is deemed
> risky to have too many implicit casts. Having one from unknown required the
> system to make decisions that could result in unexpected results that would
> be hard to catch without careful review of queries and results. It is an
> issue of some contention in the community but so far no one has convinced the
> committees to change how this works.
>
>> Please in the future, ALWAYS specify your PostgreSQL version and O/S,
>> regardless of whether or not you thinnk it is pertinent.
>
> But don't feel too bad if you forget...
>
> David J.
>
Oops! Sorry about top posting. My phone from 21th century doesnt handle this
good but I got you about it!
Deeply sorry once again!
