Re: Oddity in column specifications for table creation

On Tue, 2007-11-12 at 19:32 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Marc Munro <marc@bloodnok.com> writes:
> > This works fine:
> >     "str2"                varchar(40)
> > This does not:
> >     "str2"                "pg_catalog"."varchar"(40)
>
> Yeah.  That's because in all existing PG releases, type modifiers are
> handled by hard-wired grammar productions that *only* work for VARCHAR,
> CHARACTER VARYING, and so on, treated as keywords.
>
> Teodor did some remarkable work for 8.3, fixing things so that any type
> name could have modifiers attached, without (we hope ;-)) breaking any
> cases that worked before.  It had previously been assumed that this was
> impossible, because a type-name-plus-modifier looks just about
> indistinguishable from a function call, but he managed to find a way
> that side-stepped all the grammatical ambiguities.  Your examples all
> work fine in CVS HEAD.

Cool.

Thanks, Tom for the response, and Teodor for fixing my problem before I
even knew I had it.

__
Marc