Re: BUG #4421: convert_to() should be immutable

Andreas Peer wrote:
> Well, the use case is a strange one... I would like to use a varchar()
> column for storing a variable-length vector of integers. The numbers are
> represented by the codepoints. Therefore, I need to sort them as binary
> data, not as characters. I would often need to get all the vectors that
> lie in between to vectors, therefore I need the "binary" index.
> And the code should be as database independent as possible, therefore I
> cannot use an array or another data type that may not be supported by
> other DBMS.

What makes you think messing around with encoding conversions is going
to be portable.  Arrays are at least in the SQL standard.