Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> If you are arguing that the spec's definition of the CHARACTER type is
> not really very useful, I think you are going to find a lot of
> supporters. You can send your complaints to the SQL committee; but
> then, it is unlikely that this is going to change anytime soon because
> of the fear of breaking backwards compatibility.
>
Agreed. There may be allot of users who in the case of CAST, need to
extract the leftmost digit, and for those database and their users that
do this by default, it would cause harm.