allballs

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 02:28:48PM -0500, Merlin Moncure wrote:

I have to ask this...why is 'allballs' accepted as a literal for time?

"Allballs" is slang for "all zeros" because zeros look like balls.
You hear it sometimes in environments that use a 24-hour clock
(communications, military, etc.). Here's an example:

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/bsf2-3.html

I don't know that "allballs" is specified in any standard, so I
suspect that somebody who used the term added it to PostgreSQL
(or whatever it was called at the time) for convenience.

--
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/

Michael Fuhr <mike@fuhr.org> writes:

"Allballs" is slang for "all zeros" because zeros look like balls.
You hear it sometimes in environments that use a 24-hour clock
(communications, military, etc.). Here's an example:

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/bsf2-3.html

I don't know that "allballs" is specified in any standard, so I
suspect that somebody who used the term added it to PostgreSQL
(or whatever it was called at the time) for convenience.

I'm sure it isn't in any SQL standard ;-). Tom Lockhart is doubtless
responsible for it being in our code; I suppose he put it in because it
is in reasonably common use at JPL.

regards, tom lane

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 03:18:56PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:

Michael Fuhr <mike@fuhr.org> writes:

"Allballs" is slang for "all zeros" because zeros look like balls.
You hear it sometimes in environments that use a 24-hour clock
(communications, military, etc.). Here's an example:

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/bsf2-3.html

I don't know that "allballs" is specified in any standard, so I
suspect that somebody who used the term added it to PostgreSQL
(or whatever it was called at the time) for convenience.

I'm sure it isn't in any SQL standard ;-). Tom Lockhart is doubtless
responsible for it being in our code; I suppose he put it in because it
is in reasonably common use at JPL.

regards, tom lane

Actually I think all of the weird psuedonyms for 000000 were in
postgres very early on. I remember seeing them in illustra
and we branched postgres in 1992. So I blame funky grad students.

--elein