Re: Proposal: generate_iterator functions

Tom Lane wrote:
> "Merlin Moncure" <mmoncure@gmail.com> writes:
>> On 10/18/07, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>> generate_array_subscripts() maybe?
> 
>> array_to_set or array_expand seem a little better imo (shorter, and
>> symmetry with array_accum()), unless you want to differentiate between
>> internal funcs (array_cat and the like) vs. user funcs.
> 
> I don't much like either of those, because they seem misleading:
> what I'd expect from a function named that way is that it returns
> the *elements* of the array, not their subscripts.
> 
> Come to think of it, do we have a way of doing that directly?  If you
> only care about accessing the array elements, it seems like dealing in
> the subscripts is just notational tedium.  Perhaps there should be
> array_expand(anyarray) returns setof anyelement, in addition to the
> subscript generation function.

I think what you're describing is the SQL2003 UNNEST feature.

Joe