Re: compiler warning with VS 2017

Haribabu Kommi <kommi(dot)haribabu(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I am getting a compiler warning when I build the latest HEAD PostgreSQL with
> visual studio 2017.
> The code at the line is,
> tuple->values[i] = (char *) (Size)0xdeadbeef; /* make bad usage more obvious */

Yeah, you're not the first to complain about this. To my mind that
coding is not pretty, not cute, and not portable: there's not even
a good reason to believe that dereferencing the pointer would result
in a crash. Perhaps the author can explain to us why this is better
than just assigning NULL.

Actually, looking around a bit there, it's not even clear why
we should be booby-trapping the value of an unchanged column in
the first place. So I'd say that not only is the code dubious
but the comment is inadequate too.

regards, tom lane