Re: arrays as pl/perl input arguments [PATCH]

On Jan 12, 2011, at 11:36 AM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

>> [ Id actually vote for _not_ having a compatibility option at all, we
>> change more major things than this IMHO every major release. (And even
>> then some major things in minor releases, for example the removal of
>> Safe.pm) ]
> 
> I think the main question here is: how loudly is existing code going to
> break?  If the breakage is silent, it's going to be very problematic.
> If functions fail to run at all, then we can live without the
> compatibility option.

I suspect it'd be quiet, unfortunately, since there are a bazillion ad hoc implementations of a Perl SQL array parser, and many of them, I suspect, don't complain if the string doesn't look like an SQL array. They would just parse a string like "ARRAY(0x118ee2a0)" and return an empty array, or a NULL.

Best,

David