> On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 01:16:34PM -0700, George Pavlov wrote: > > Hmm, I am not sure I particularly like this behavior or the > > "ignore it" > > advice. Suppose someone makes a typo in his/her table > > definition: meant > > to create an int4 column but accidentally typed an underscore. You'd > > expect the statement to fail. Instead it doesn't fail but creates an > > unexpected datatype for the column. If undescore is a > > purposeful (rather > > than an accidental) SQL standard extension one would expect > > it to be (a) documented in some place like > > > > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/static/arrays.html#AEN5584, and (b) > > behaving more consistently (if _foo is a synonym for foo[] then all > > variations of "foo" should support it). > > Hmm, if someone typos to get "int8" instead of "int4" they get the > wrong datatype too, I don't know if that's an argument. The reason is > that all types need to have an identifier. I suppose they could be > called "pg_internal_array_type_for_int4", but for historical reasons > it's just _int4. yes, but int8 is a clearly documented while preceding certain "magic" datatype names with underscores is not. i really don't have much of a problem with this, but little things like this contribute to people coming from other DBMSs developing opinions that "this open-source stuff does weird, undocumented things" (not that commercial DBMSs don't do weird stuff :). sorry to belabor a minor point. george
