Re: grant execute on many functions

Tom Lane wrote:
> Um.  Sooner or later we ought to do something about the whole
> automatic-casting-to-and-from-text issue.  Datatypes shouldn't have to
> supply both I/O procedures and text cast procedures.

I thought automatic (i.e. implicit) casting-to-and-from-text was a no-no
because it could cause strange and unintended conversion to take place,
no? I do believe that explict casting to text should be allowed -- the
result of any OUT function can be represented as text, can't it? A
C-language version of the following should do it:

create or replace function any2text(anyelement) returns text as '
  begin
   return $1;
  end;
' language plpgsql;

And if we could cast text to cstring, it could be the input of any IN
function. Hmmm, I guess you can cast any literal to cstring though:

select int4in('1'::cstring);
  int4in
--------
       1
(1 row)


> Right, in the short term you can make it work inside a plpgsql function,
> since plpgsql is pretty darn lax about casting.  But it'd be nice if it
> worked more generally.
>

So what would that look like, and still be "safe".

Joe