On 23 June 2011 00:37, Greg Stark <st...@mit.edu> wrote: > Hm. I have to say the single most confusing thing about the Postgres > source that took me a *long* time to get over was remembering that > some of the typedefs were already pointers and some weren't. It seems > silly now but when I was trying to understand what the intent of a > function was and it wasn't obvious that some of the arguments appeared > to be pass by value but were actually pass by reference it made things > really surprising.
I agree that the inconsistency is annoying. If we were starting from scratch, I'd encourage abandoning the convention. It's a leaky abstraction. At the risk of saying something that will raise eyebrows, I'll point out that the win32 API follows a similar practice. The difference is that they have consistent conventions in how they name their typdefs, so that you get to learn the patterns. -- Peter Geoghegan http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
