Re: Dumb question about serial's upper limit

On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 02:22:23AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby@pervasive.com> writes:
> > Out of curiosity... why don't we have unsigned ints?
>
> Quick, is 42 an int or an unsigned int?
>
> I think it'd create a slew of new ambiguous cases in the
> numeric-datatype hierarchy, for what is really pretty darn small gain.
> We're already just barely getting by the problem that 42 might be
> intended as an int2 or int8 constant --- and at least those three
> datatypes have compatible comparison semantics, so that there aren't any
> fundamental semantic problems created if you decide that a constant is
> one or the other.  Adding unsigned types to the mix seems to me to be
> likely to cause some serious issues.

Couldn't the same logic of starting with the most restrictive case and
working up work here as well?
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461