Re: Limited varchar, unlimited varchar, or text?

>
>
> After looking at the docs on the
>character datatypes I noticed that if you don't specify a limit on the varchar
>type it will accept strings of any length.  If that's the case, what's the
>difference between it and text?
>
>
Actually, I'd like to know this too :-)
I think that there is no difference really...

But what confuses me is - why are there two completely separate types?
Is it just to keep the standards happy?
Or is there some hidden difference in the behaviour?
For example, there used to be a 'datetime' in 7.2, that was just an
alias for timestamp without timezone -
so that:
create table times (t timestamp without time zone, d datetime);
 \d times
 Column |            Type             | Modifiers
--------+-----------------------------+-----------
 t      | timestamp without time zone |
 d      | timestamp without time zone |


But if I try the same thing with text and varchar, I get two different
type - text and character varying...

Could somebody who knows shed some light on this?

Thanks!

Dima