implementations of strtol() treat empty strings ("") as invalid arguments
while others convert this (erroneously, IHMO) to zero (0).  Assuming that the
expected behaviour of pg_atoi() is to return 0 if it is passed an empty
string, I am supplying the following patch to explictly check for an empty
string in pg_atoi() and return 0 if the string is empty.  The patch will also
trap a NULL character pointer being passed to pg_atoi() and will use elog() to
print out an error message if the input char pointer is NULL.


Billy G. Allie