Monday, August 23, 2010

PL/SQL Challenge players finds doc bug in STANDARD package

The PL/SQL Challenge recently (6 August) offered a quiz on the INSTR function. I showed everyone the header of this function from the STANDARD package in which it is defined:

-- Find nth occurrence of str1 in str2 starting at pos
function INSTR(STR1 VARCHAR2 CHARACTER SET ANY_CS,
   STR2 VARCHAR2 CHARACTER SET STR1%CHARSET,
   POS PLS_INTEGER := 1,
   NTH POSITIVE := 1) return PLS_INTEGER;

Jean Xu reported a problem with the comment above the header. It should say "of str2 in str1"! I'd never noticed this, with all the times I've looked at the STANDARD package. I let Bryn Llewellyn, PL/SQL Product Manager, know about this, so hopefully the next release of Oracle will include a correction.

Yet another benefit of playing the PL/SQL Challenge: you can help improve the quality of the PL/SQL language itself!

So if you are not yet one of the more than 2400 developers who have been taking the quiz in the last month, register and start playing today!

1 comment:

Tim Eyres said...

Well just goes to prove, comments are seldom read!