On 1/10/14, 9:04 AM, Dean Rasheed wrote:
On 10 January 2014 00:36, Marko Tiikkaja <ma...@joh.to> wrote:
Can you point me to some examples?
The example I see all the time is code like
if array_length(nodes, 1) < 5 then
... do something ...
then you realise (or not as the case may be) that this doesn't work
for empty arrays, and have to remember to wrap it in a coalesce call.
Simply being able to write
if cardinality(nodes) < 5 then
... do something ...
is not just shorter, easier to type and easier to read, it is far less
likely to be the source of subtle bugs
But this is what I don't understand: why do you care whether there's
less than 5 elements in the array, but you don't care about how they're
organized? '[2:3]={1,2}'::int[] and '{{1},{2}}'::int[] both give the
same result when unnest()ed, sure, but why do you want to accept such
crap as input if you just want a list of elements?
I guess what I truly want is a less generic type that's like an array,
but always one-dimensional with a lower bound of 1. There's too much
garbage that can be passed to a function taking an array as an input
right now.
Regards,
Marko Tiikkaja
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