Re: minor view creation weirdness

Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:
> Uhm, doesn't the spec have anything to say about this? 
> I mean, the view sure looks like standard SQL on its face.

Well, you might read the spec as requiring the view column to have
datatype CHAR(n) where n is the length of the unknown literal.
I see in SQL92:
        9) The data type of a <character string literal> is fixed-length           character string. The length of a
<characterstring literal>           is the number of <character representation>s that it contains.           ...
  Note: <character string literal>s are allowed to be zero-length           strings (i.e., to contain no characters)
eventhough it is           not permitted to declare a <data type> that is CHARACTER with           <length> zero.
 

The NOTE would appear to imply that
CREATE VIEW v AS SELECT '';

is illegal, which is not a conclusion I care to follow blindly.  In any
case, in Postgres I would think we would want to take the type as "text"
not "CHAR(n)", spec or no spec.
        regards, tom lane