Robert Treat <xzilla@users.sourceforge.net> writes:
> On Tuesday 19 December 2006 11:25, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
>> A patch to allow seperate physical and logical orderings was submitted
>> and rejected. Unless something has changed on that front, any
>> discussion in this direction isn't really useful.
> The patch was rejected on technical means, and the author decided it was too
> much work to finish it. If someone wanted to try and complete that work I
> don't think anyone would stand against it.
Apparently you don't remember the discussion. The fundamental objection
to it was that it would create a never-ending source of bugs, ie, using
the logical column number where the physical number was required or vice
versa. Even assuming that we could eliminate all such bugs in the code
base at any instant, what would prevent introduction of another such bug
in every patch? Most ordinary test cases would fail to expose the
difference.
If you can show me a reasonably bulletproof or machine-checkable way to
keep the two kinds of column numbers distinct, I'd be all for it. But
without that, the answer will remain no.
regards, tom lane