On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 01:33:41PM -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Steve Crawford
> <scrawford@pinpointresearch.com> wrote:
> > Although it might cause a fair amount of backward-compatibility
> > trouble, the string representation could either use NULL to
> > represent a null element as is allowed in other contexts or
> > require that empty-string elements be represented as "" to
> > differentiate ,"", (empty-string element) from ,, (null element).
>
> That would cause a substantial amount of grief to people who might
> not want that behavior, though. I use these functions for creating
> human-readable output, not for serialization. Simple, predictable
> behavior is very important.
My question boils down to, "why is this string concatenation different
from all other string concatenations?"
For now, the answer can be, "it behaves differently with respect to
NULLs," and we just document this. We can later decide whether this
behavior should change.
Cheers,
David.
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