Re: A couple items on TODO

From: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net>
To: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
Cc: Christopher Kings-Lynne <chriskl(at)familyhealth(dot)com(dot)au>, Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us>, Jeff Davis <list-pgsql-hackers(at)dynworks(dot)com>, <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: A couple items on TODO
Date: 2001-08-24 14:24:27
Message-ID: Pine.LNX.4.30.0108241619080.677-100000@peter.localdomain
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Tom Lane writes:

> Yeah, people have started to use 'const' in new code, but the older
> stuff doesn't use it, which means that the net effect is probably
> more annoyance than help. I'm afraid that if we attack this in an
> incremental way, we'll end up with code that may have a lot of const
> markers in the declarations, but the actual code is riddled with
> explicit casts to remove const because at one time or another that
> was necessary in a particular place.
>
> Can anyone think of a way to get from here to there without either
> a lot of leftover cruft, or a "big bang" massive changeover?

What I usually do if I feel a parameter could be made const is to
propagate the change as far as necessary to the underlying functions.
>From time to time this turns out to be impossible at some layer. BUT:
This is an indicator that you really don't know whether the value is const
so you shouldn't declare it thus.

IMHO, a better project than putting const qualifiers all over interfaces
that you are not familiar with would be to clean up all the -Wcast-qual
warnings.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter

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