Re: Disallow arrays with non-standard lower bounds

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Jeff Janes <jeff(dot)janes(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:26 PM, Jim Nasby <jim(at)nasby(dot)net> wrote:
>>
>> On 1/9/14, 10:58 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>>
>>> Jim Nasby <jim(at)nasby(dot)net> writes:
>>>>
>>>> ISTM that allowing users to pick arbitrary lower array bounds was a huge
>>>> mistake. I've never seen anyone make use of it, can't think of any
>>>> legitimate use cases for it, and hate the stupendous amount of extra code
>>>> needed to deal with it.
>>>
>>>
>>> You lack imagination, sir.
>>
>>
>> Considering what you'd normally want to do in SQL, the only example I can
>> think of is to not have the argument over 0 vs 1 based.
>>
>> Actually, I was thinking there might be some computational problems where
>> changing lower bound would be nice, but then again, what other languages
>> actually support this?
>
> Perl does, though they regret it bitterly.

What does it matter? Our arrays have had the capability for years and
years and "because it's cleaner" is simply not justification to break
people's applications. Why are we even considering this?

merlin