Re: B-Tree support function number 3 (strxfrm() optimization)

I don't think we have to promise a strict priority queue and preempt all other development. But I agree loosely that processing patches that have been around should be a higher priority.

I've been meaning to do more review for a while and just took a skim through the queue. There are only a couple I feel I can contribute with so I'm going to work on those and then if it's still before the feature freeze I would like to go ahead with Peter's patch. I think it's generally a good patch.

Two questions I have:

1) Would it make more sense to use a floating point instead of an integer? I saw a need for a function like this when I was looking into doing GPU sorts. But GPUs expect floating point values. 

2) I would want to see a second data type, probably numeric, before committing to be sure we had a reasonably generic api. But it's pretty simply to do so.