AW: Re: charin(), text_char() should return something e lse for empty input

An alternative approach is to make charin and text_char map empty
strings to the null character (\0), and conversely make charout and
char_text map the null character to empty strings. charout already
acts that way, in effect, since it has to produce a null-terminated
This way would have the advantage that there would still
be a reversible dump and reload representation for a "char" field
containing '\0'

I more like this. IIRC some implementations allow storing a \0 in char(n) also.
Then it is 8bit clean and can be used for a 1 byte number. Such values
can usually only be inserted and selected with host variables.

Andreas