Re: [HACKERS] Names that suddenly include an OID

Bruce Momjian <maillist(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:

> OK, it was me who added it, and it still has some problems. The
> reason the oid was added is that the old code just displayed the
> pg_proc.proname for regproc fields, and the input function just
> found the FIRST function with a matching name, which is a problem
> because we can have multiple functions with the same name but
> different types.

Then the code in question should be changed to properly look for a
tuple where the name matches _and_ the types are right. Combining the
(overloaded) name and the (unique) OID into a text string seems very
inelegant to me, and intuitively very, very wrong: if names aren't
usable in a certain situation, use OIDs instead -- that's what they're
for -- but don't change the name to add (seemingly) random numbers to
make them unique.

Contrived, silly, irrelevant example to illuminate how I'm thinking:
if you used the string 'plus' to signify addition, and you decided you
had to differentiate between adding integers and adding floats, then

findfunc('plus');

should become

findfunc('plus', 'integer');

instead of forcing the programmer to write things like

findfunc('plus_234893');

or adding weird code to every use of 'plus' to look up what the silly,
composite name happens to be this time.

-tih
--
Popularity is the hallmark of mediocrity. --Niles Crane, "Frasier"