Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:
> <brainstorming>We could add an integer prefix to the char() datatype
> with the "total" length and then just not include the spaces. But that
> would make it not binary compatible with text -- which would mean
> implementing a whole bunch of casts and operators.
Um, it's already not binary compatible with text. The space hit would
be a bigger issue ... at least for cases where you don't save much of
anything by eliminating the spaces, which would be exactly the cases
where sane Postgres users use char(n) today.
regards, tom lane