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from the other string-category types; this eliminates a lot of surprising interpretations that the parser could formerly make when there was no directly applicable operator. Create a general mechanism that supports casts to and from the standard string types (text,varchar,bpchar) for *every* datatype, by invoking the datatype's I/O functions. These new casts are assignment-only in the to-string direction, explicit-only in the other, and therefore should create no surprising behavior. Remove a bunch of thereby-obsoleted datatype-specific casting functions. The "general mechanism" is a new expression node type CoerceViaIO that can actually convert between *any* two datatypes if their external text representations are compatible. This is more general than needed for the immediate feature, but might be useful in plpgsql or other places in future. This commit does nothing about the issue that applying the concatenation operator || to non-text types will now fail, often with strange error messages due to misinterpreting the operator as array concatenation. Since it often (not always) worked before, we should either make it succeed or at least give a more user-friendly error; but details are still under debate. Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
PostgreSQL Database Management System ===================================== This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL database management system. PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions. This distribution also contains C language bindings. PostgreSQL has many language interfaces including some of the more common listed below: C++ - http://thaiopensource.org/development/libpqxx/ JDBC - http://jdbc.postgresql.org ODBC - http://odbc.postgresql.org Perl - http://search.cpan.org/~dbdpg/ PHP - http://www.php.net Python - http://www.initd.org/ Ruby - http://ruby.scripting.ca/postgres/ Other language binding are available from a variety of contributing parties. PostgreSQL also has a great number of procedural languages available, a short but not complete list is below: PL/pgSQL - included in PostgreSQL source distribution PL/Perl - included in PostgreSQL source distribution PL/PHP - http://projects.commandprompt.com/projects/public/plphp PL/Python - included in PostgreSQL source distribution PL/Java - http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/pljava/projdisplay.php PL/Tcl - included in PostgreSQL source distribution See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install PostgreSQL. That file also lists supported operating systems and hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL system. Changes between all PostgreSQL releases are recorded in the file HISTORY. Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT. A comprehensive documentation set is included in this distribution; it can be read as described in the installation instructions. The latest version of this software may be obtained at http://www.postgresql.org/download/. For more information look at our web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.