Re: [HACKERS] Re: ORDBMS

Chris Bitmead <chris(at)bitmead(dot)com> writes:
> Yes, postgres pretends that classes as datatypes work, but if I remember
> right it doesn't work in practice.

I imagine it did work, at least partly, back in the Berkeley days.
But as someone's already pointed out in this thread, ever since the
code left Berkeley the main development thrust has been on achieving
SQL compliance (not to mention robustness). POSTQUEL had a lot of
non-SQL features, many of which are now suffering from bit rot...
this is one.

For a lot of this older stuff, there isn't even any documentation
(that I know of) on what it's *supposed* to do, let alone on how
thorough the original implementation was. For instance, I have
no idea what "classes as datatypes" actually means, in the sense
of what you could do with them in POSTQUEL. Anyone remember?

> I would have thought what was in the near future, is whatever people
> choose to hack on. I take it no-one is going to reject sensible patches
> along this line?

First problem is to figure out what it should be doing ;-). If you
can get consensus on that, I doubt anyone will object to making it
work again.

regards, tom lane