It seems that the suggestion to fill intermediate positions with NULLs
would be preferable to the current behavior.

I know of no requirement to populate arrays in sequence in any other
language so I think other programmers would be surprised too by the
current behavior.

Paul


Tom Lane wrote:
> [ expanding this thread, as it now needs wider discussion ]
>
> "Paul B. Anderson" <paul.a@pnlassociates.com> writes:
>
>> Actually, I was not filling all of the arrays in sequential order. I
>> added code to initialize them in order and the function seems to be
>> working now. Is that a known problem?
>>
>
> Well, it's a documented behavior: section 8.10.4 saith
>
> A stored array value can be enlarged by assigning to an element
> adjacent to those already present, or by assigning to a slice
> that is adjacent to or overlaps the data already present.
>
> Up to 8.2 we didn't have a lot of choice about this, because without any
> ability to have nulls embedded in arrays, there wasn't any sane thing to
> do with the intermediate positions if you assigned to an element not
> adjacent to the existing range. As of 8.2 we could allow assignment to
> arbitrary positions by filling the intermediate positions with nulls.
> The code hasn't actually been changed to allow that, but it's something
> we could consider doing now.
>
> Comments?
>
> regards, tom lane
>
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