On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 10:16 AM Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentr...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: > On 15/11/2018 15:10, Robert Haas wrote: > > I don't have a strong position on 1 vs. 2 vs. 3, but I do think it > > would be nicer not to use '\0' as a column value. I'd suggest you use > > 'n' or '0' or '-' or some other printable character instead. > > I had carefully considered this when attidentity was added. Using '\0' > allows you to use this column as a boolean in C code, which is often > convenient. Also, there are numerous places where a pg_attribute form > or a tuple descriptor is initialized to all zeroes, which works well for > most fields, and adding one exception like this would create a lot of > extra work and bloat the patch and create potential for future > instability. Also note that a C char '\0' is represented as '' (empty > string) in SQL, so this also creates a natural representation in SQL.
I'm not really convinced. I think that the stdbool work you've been doing shows that blurring the line between char and bool is a bad idea. And I believe that on general principle, anyway. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
