Geoff,

> > In my experience, I have never felt the need to trim right spaces.
>
> Just curious, what sort of applications do you write? Business
> systems, scientific, repository or what?

I think we two write the same kind of application, perhaps I just trust
my users more than you do. ;-)

> The data is all
> carefully validated and reformated according to the business rules -
> not according to user whim.

in my applications the data is always validated, never changed. This
includes leading and trailing spaces, I say. or, at least, I never felt
the need to automate a different behaviour (ie if and when I need to
trim, I do it programmatically).

> > 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?
>
> Only that CHAR fields, by definition, are expected to be fixed length,
> and so you expect trailing spaces. VARCHAR fields are expected to be
> varying. The assumption being (in may case at least) that I have
> declared a variable length field because I expect it to be the length
> of the significant input characters and I generally dont consider
> spaces (or nulls) to be significant.

In fact I do.
I bet Jason will have to follow the majority's preference on this.
Ciao
--
____
_/\/ando