Re: RfD: more powerful "any" types

From: "Kevin Grittner" <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov>
To: "Robert Haas" <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>, "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
Cc: "Alvaro Herrera" <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>, "Peter Eisentraut" <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net>, "David E(dot) Wheeler" <david(at)kineticode(dot)com>, "Pg Hackers" <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: RfD: more powerful "any" types
Date: 2009-09-10 14:06:55
Message-ID: 4AA8C1AF020000250002AC14@gw.wicourts.gov
Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox | Resend email
Thread:
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)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

In response to

Browse pgsql-hackers by date

  From Date Subject
Next Message Tom Lane 2009-09-10 14:09:23 Re: Ragged CSV import
Previous Message Tatsuo Ishii 2009-09-10 14:00:52 Re: pgbench hard coded constants