VIEWS, DISTINCT and COUNT

Okay,

I'm used to a feature that allows combining count and distinct in Sybase. 
I thought it was standard SQL and expected to see it in Postgres.  Whatever
the case might be, postgres does not seem to support this.  I keep running
into queries that I cannot write.  Here's the skinny:

"select count(distinct id) from table" is not supported.  Getting this
information without count(distinct id) support is a pain and always seems
to require creating temporary table and running queries later.  My first
solution was to create a view that just selected the distinct colmuns that
I was interested in and then do a count on that table.  This too seems
impossible.

For both count(distinct) and distinct in views, I have this question:  Is 
this something that needs to be supported but just never got implemented?
Or, is it something that was conciously excluded?  If nobody is working on 
these, I may take a look them and pick the easier to implement.  What little
I know about the way postgres works, I expect the first one would be esier.


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