• Tom Lane's avatar
    Support subscripting of arbitrary types, not only arrays. · c7aba7c1
    Tom Lane authored
    This patch generalizes the subscripting infrastructure so that any
    data type can be subscripted, if it provides a handler function to
    define what that means.  Traditional variable-length (varlena) arrays
    all use array_subscript_handler(), while the existing fixed-length
    types that support subscripting use raw_array_subscript_handler().
    It's expected that other types that want to use subscripting notation
    will define their own handlers.  (This patch provides no such new
    features, though; it only lays the foundation for them.)
    
    To do this, move the parser's semantic processing of subscripts
    (including coercion to whatever data type is required) into a
    method callback supplied by the handler.  On the execution side,
    replace the ExecEvalSubscriptingRef* layer of functions with direct
    calls to callback-supplied execution routines.  (Thus, essentially
    no new run-time overhead should be caused by this patch.  Indeed,
    there is room to remove some overhead by supplying specialized
    execution routines.  This patch does a little bit in that line,
    but more could be done.)
    
    Additional work is required here and there to remove formerly
    hard-wired assumptions about the result type, collation, etc
    of a SubscriptingRef expression node; and to remove assumptions
    that the subscript values must be integers.
    
    One useful side-effect of this is that we now have a less squishy
    mechanism for identifying whether a data type is a "true" array:
    instead of wiring in weird rules about typlen, we can look to see
    if pg_type.typsubscript == F_ARRAY_SUBSCRIPT_HANDLER.  For this
    to be bulletproof, we have to forbid user-defined types from using
    that handler directly; but there seems no good reason for them to
    do so.
    
    This patch also removes assumptions that the number of subscripts
    is limited to MAXDIM (6), or indeed has any hard-wired limit.
    That limit still applies to types handled by array_subscript_handler
    or raw_array_subscript_handler, but to discourage other dependencies
    on this constant, I've moved it from c.h to utils/array.h.
    
    Dmitry Dolgov, reviewed at various times by Tom Lane, Arthur Zakirov,
    Peter Eisentraut, Pavel Stehule
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+q6zcVDuGBv=M0FqBYX8DPebS3F_0KQ6OVFobGJPM507_SZ_w@mail.gmail.com
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+q6zcVovR+XY4mfk-7oNk-rF91gH0PebnNfuUjuuDsyHjOcVA@mail.gmail.com
    c7aba7c1
deparse.c 94.1 KB