PostgreSQL ASCII numeric operators

PostgreSQL has some ASCII numeric representations of commonly used numeric operators. It could be not well know, since I suspect pretty much everyone is using the function operators, and moreover it is not so simple to find them in the documentation by means of a searching for.
In any case, here they are:

|/ is the same as sqrt;
||/ is the same as cbrt;
@ is the same as abs.

An of course, it is quite easy to test such operators in action:

testdb=> SELECT
            sqrt( 81 ) as sqrt,
            |/ 81 as root,
            cbrt( 1000 ) as cube_root,
            ||/ 1000 as root3,
            abs( -19 ) as abs,
            @ -19 as absolute;

-[ RECORD 1 ]-
sqrt      | 9
root      | 9
cube_root | 10
root3     | 10
abs       | 19
absolute  | 19

Quite frankly, I believe the function operators are more readable, in particular since I’ve never seen (yet) such operators in other programming languages.

The article PostgreSQL ASCII numeric operators has been posted by Luca Ferrari on October 10, 2022

Tags: postgresql , planet-postgresql-org