Making cstring type less pseudo and more real

The original problem with "opaque" is gone in CVS tip:

regression=# select cash_out(2);
ERROR: Function cash_out(integer) does not exist
Unable to identify a function that satisfies the given argument types
You may need to add explicit typecasts

However, I'm not entirely satisfied with it. In particular, the type
system will still allow you to pass the result of an output function to
another input function:

regression=# select textin(inet_out('123.123.123.123'));
textin
--------

(1 row)

I should have gotten '123.123.123.123' here, but didn't, and in other
cases I get garbage. (I'm not sure that a crash is possible, but I'm
not sure one isn't, either.) This seems like a reasonable operation
in many cases, so I don't really want to put in a kluge to disallow it.

The problem comes down to the fact that the system can't really cope
with Datums of type cstring: it doesn't know how to copy them. We have
cstring declared as a pass-by-value type, which it isn't, and so the
pointer gets pushed around without concern for copying the pointed-to
string.

I am thinking about declaring type cstring in pg_type as
pass-by-reference with typlen set to -2, and altering the places that
interpret typlen to understand -2 as meaning null-terminated string.
(Currently, typlen > 0 means a fixed-length type, typlen = -1 is used
for varlena values which have a length word, and there's no meaning
assigned to other negative typlen values.)

I haven't really looked to see how many places would need to change,
but if it's not too many then this seems reasonable to do --- it would
make the cstring feature a lot more robust than it is now.

Comments?

regards, tom lane