Re: Extending a bit string

I've been thinking about that, and that actually makes sense and I'd prefer to revert to the pre-8.0 behavior. I just wanted to speak up to retract that response too. In reality, I am used to the interger display as it currently is. The current behavior of the coercion to/from int enforces the bias that I have. It led me to believe that PostgreSQL would act like that consistently because that's what I am used to.

As compared to 10100000. But fundamentally SQL and the current helper functions don't operate like that, so it's bizarre. Moreover, the difference between the two makes it very error prone. For example, this doesn't make sense,

    SELECT get_bit(1::bit(1), 0),     get_bit(1::bit(2), 1);

But, this does

    SELECT get_bit(B'1'::bit(1), 0),     get_bit(B'1'::bit(2), 1);

I'm sure it would have been substantially less confusing if integers displayed their LSB on the left after casting. I think I would have figured out what was going on *much* faster. You were right on everything in your initial response (as I've come to expect).