Re: Simplifying unknown-literal handling

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@surnet.cl> writes:
> On Sun, May 29, 2005 at 11:47:18AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Anyone see a reason not to change this?

> Is there any way we use UNKNOWN to represent bytea literals?
> Say, comparing a untyped literal to a bytea column?

We use UNKNOWN to represent the raw string literal before we've
figured out that we need to feed it to byteain.  There aren't
going to be any embedded nulls at that point, if that's what
you are wondering.

If we ever decide to try to support embedded nulls in datatype
external representations, there are going to be way more changes
needed than just changing UNKNOWN again ... for starters, changing
the I/O functions of every single built-in and user-defined data type.
I don't think that's ever going to happen, so I'm not particularly
worried about propagating the assumption into one more place.
        regards, tom lane