On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > The argument here is basically between ease of use and ability to detect > common programming mistakes. It's not clear to me that there is any > principled way to make such a tradeoff, because different people can > reasonably put different weights on those two goals.
I think that is true. But for whatever it's worth, and at the risk of beating a horse that seems not to be dead yet in spite of the fact that I feel I've already administered one hell of a beating, the LPAD case is unambiguous, and therefore it is hard to see what sort of programming mistake we are protecting users against. If there's only one function called bob, and the user says bob(x), it is hard to see what behavior, other than calling bob with x as an argument, would be even mildly sensible. (Yes, OK, there are two lpad functions, but as you pointed out previously, they take different numbers of arguments, so the point still stands.) -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
