Re: Range Types - typo + NULL string constructor

On Oct10, 2011, at 20:06 , Thom Brown wrote:
> Okay, a real example of why discrete should be '[]' and continuous
> should be '[)'.
> 
> If you book a meeting from 09:00 to 11:00 (tsrange), at 11:00
> precisely it either becomes free or is available to someone else, so
> it can be booked 11:00 to 12:00 without conflict.
> 
> If you have raffle tickets numbered 1 to 100 (int4range), and you ask
> for tickets 9 to 11, no-one else can use 11 as it aligns with the last
> one you bought.
> 
> So for me, it's intuitive for them to behave differently.  So yes,
> default behaviour would vary between types, but I didn't previously
> read anything on default_flags, so I don't know where that comes into
> it.  Shouldn't it be the case that if a type has a canonical function,
> it's entirely inclusive, otherwise it's upper boundary is exclusive?

I'm not convinced by this. The question here is not whether which types
of ranges we *support*, only which type we consider to be more *canonical*,
and whether the bounds provided to a range constructor are inclusive or
exclusive by *default*.

Maybe ranges over discrete types are slightly more likely to be closed,
and ranges over continuous types slightly more likely to be open. Still,
I very much doubt that the skew in the distribution is large enough to
warrant the confusion and possibility of subtle bugs we introduce by making
the semantics of a range type's constructor depend on the definition of the
range and/or base type. Especially since we're talking about only *6* extra
characters to communicate the intended inclusivity/exclusivity of the bounds
to the range constructor.

Also, the distinction between types for which ranges should "obviously"
be closed, and those for which they should "obviously" be half-open is nowhere
as clear-cut as it seems at first sight.

First, there's the type "date", which in my book is discrete. So we'd make
date ranges closed by default, not half-open. And there's timestamp, which
is continuous so we'd make its default half-open. That doesn't seem exactly
intuitive to me.

Second, there's int4 and float8, one discrete, one continuous. So would we
make int4range(1, 2) include 2, but float8range(1.0, 2.0) *not* include 2.0?

best regards,
Florian Pflug