Re: RfD: more powerful "any" types

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> There are languages much less obscure than Haskell that support
> passing functions as arguments to other functions, such as C.
Or Java, which lets you, for example, pass a Class or Method as an
argument, and includes support for generics.
I see that pgfoundry has pl/Java, which has an activity percentile
of 91.08%.  I'm not sure whether this could address the needs that
started this discussion, since I assume such capabilities would only
be usable when invoking one Java method from another.  I'm just
saying -- these features aren't all that esoteric; we use
introspection and reflection within our Java software.  While we
probably wouldn't use such features in PostgreSQL (if they were
there) because of our portability mandate; I can certainly
understand those who don't mind PostgreSQL-specific code and want to
move more of the business logic to the DBMS wanting such features.
-Kevin