• Tom Lane's avatar
    Prevent invoking I/O conversion casts via functional/attribute notation. · 543d22fc
    Tom Lane authored
    PG 8.4 added a built-in feature for casting pretty much any data type to
    string types (text, varchar, etc).  We allowed this to work in any of the
    historically-allowed syntaxes: CAST(x AS text), x::text, text(x), or
    x.text.  However, multiple complaints have shown that it's too easy to
    invoke such casts unintentionally in the latter two styles, particularly
    field selection.  To cure the problem with the narrowest possible change
    of behavior, disallow use of I/O conversion casts from composite types to
    string types via functional/attribute syntax.  The new functionality is
    still available via cast syntax.
    
    In passing, document the equivalence of functional and attribute syntax
    in a more visible place.
    543d22fc
xfunc.sgml 113 KB