Re: I/O support for composite types

Tom Lane wrote:
> Thomas Hallgren <thhal@mailblocks.com> writes:
> 
>>Why not use standard C semantics for the textual representation with 
>>your addition that empty items are NULL?
> 
> 
> This isn't C, it's SQL; and I think the array I/O representation is a
> closer precedent for us than the C standard.
> 
> In any case, how much of C syntax are you proposing to emulate exactly?
> Comments?  Backslashed newlines?  Joining of adjacent double-quoted
> strings?  Conversion of octal and hex integer constants (and what about
> L, U, LL, etc suffixes)?  There's a lot more stuff there than meets the
> eye, and most of it isn't something I want to code.
> 

I'm not proposing a full C parser implementation :-) Just static data 
initializer part.

To answer how much of the C syntax:

Comments, no. SQL has a standard for comments that doesn't conflict with 
C semantics for data initializers.

Joining of adjacent double-quoted strings. Yes, of course. That's what 
you already do for arrays today. Without this, it will be hard to write 
long strings in a readable way.

Conversion of backslashed newlines, octal and integer constants within 
strings, yes, why not? The issue of non-printables needs to be addressed 
somehow. What do you propose?

Regarding the L, U, LL suffixes, depends in what way do you plan to 
tackle different character sets. Perhaps UTF-8 with unicode escapes 
would be better. Some mechanism i needed, that's for sure.

Kind regards,

Thomas Hallgren