Re: Array with a lower bound>1, PostgreSQL 8.3.6

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 02:22:34PM +0100, Thomas Jacob wrote:

> I was wondering if there are any plans to properly support arrays with a
> lower bound greater than one:

Well, we may first need to get the semantics straight.

If the lower bound isn't "natural" (as in 0 or 1, whatever
seems natural to the problem at hand) it becomes arbitrary -
a label rather than an index. In those weird cases where the
label seems to be an index it really just stands for the
real index (label "100" == real index at offset 100).

Given arbitrary labels we don't speak about mapping
PostgreSQL arrays to Python lists-of-lists anymore, I would
therefore suggest mapping non-"natural" arrays to ordered
(?) dicts-of-dicts with integer keys.

This was just a primer for discussion - I heartily invite
criticism :-)

Karsten
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