Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>
> No, you're trying to convey that it is more benign/useful _to you_. Others
> are arguing that they want to write conformant code, and don't much care
> what MyOccasionallyReadTheSpec does. It's a pity that SQL conformance is
> not better across systems, but surely the way to improve that is to reduce
> the number of products that are being careless, not to increase them?
>
Let's leave it as-is then. We'll conform to the spec, and this good
since someone may want to extract the leftmost char from a base-10
number representation.
Henceforth SELECT CAST(123 AS char) will and should undisputedly return '1'.