Re: [HACKERS] Re: Status on 7.0

[Charset ISO-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> On 2000-01-19, Thomas Lockhart mentioned:
>
> > istm that pg_dump could benefit greatly if it translated internal
> > Postgres type names to the SQL92-standard names. For example, int4 ->
> > integer, int8 -> bigint, etc. This would be analogous to the
> > translation we do when parsing queries in the backend, converting
> > (e.g.) integer -> int4.
>
> I certainly think this is a good idea, but I don't consider the proposed
> approach too good. The reason is that the next thing you'd have to do is
> fix up psql as well, creating one more source of inconsistency. Not to
> mention other similar applications which we don't have any control over,
> such as pgbash.
>
> What I'd suggest -- and the 7.0 release is certainly one of the better
> times to do this -- is to change the catalog entries to "integer",
> "bigint", etc. and instead do the translation of the "deprecated" (or
> "traditional", if you like) types "int4", "int8", etc. into the standard
> ones. As far as I can see this would require only two changes for each
> datatype (gram.y:xlateSqlType(), and pg_type.h), so this could be done
> transparently to the rest of the code. And client applications don't need
> to know this at all.
>
> Is there a problem with this I'm not seeing (other than perhaps affective
> attachment to Postgres'isms)? This almost seems too trivial to not have
> been done already.

[The big incomatibility alarm goes off.]

We have to discuss if this is a good idea. I am not sure.

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Bruce Momjian | http://www.op.net/~candle
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