Geoff,

I agree with most of your points, but...

> My answer to this is that I do know that in _almost_ all text fields
> of every application I have written that trailing whitespace (and
> often leading whitespace) is undesireable. If IBO were not removing
> it by default, I would be removing it - without warning to the user,
> just as many fields up sent to uppercase without asking the user.

In my experience, I have never felt the need to trim right spaces.

> Where whitespace is desirable I make a point of using CHAR.

I wouldn't confuse CHAR/VARCHAR with trimming issues. I don't see that
they overlap.

> * I am proposing that we set up the defaults that seem consistent with
> the SQL data type definition.

I don't think so. IB will happily let you write trailing spaces into a
VARCHAR field (unless you type them in in a grid with IB_WISQL! ;-)).
Could you elaborate what do you exactly mean with consistence here?

The BDE doesn't do trimming. The ClientDataSet does (and you can't force
it not to!), and it cause problems.
As you said, provided it's documented, the default behaviour it's not
that much an issue.
--
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_/\/ando