Re: Why some GUC parameter names are not lowercased - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: Why some GUC parameter names are not lowercased
Date
Msg-id 12982.1351613498@sss.pgh.pa.us
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In response to Why some GUC parameter names are not lowercased  (Gurjeet Singh <singh.gurjeet@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: Why some GUC parameter names are not lowercased  (Gurjeet Singh <singh.gurjeet@gmail.com>)
List pgsql-general
Gurjeet Singh <singh.gurjeet@gmail.com> writes:
> Is there a reason why Postgres chose to not use all lowercase characters
> for these parameters' names.
>  DateStyle
>  IntervalStyle
>  TimeZone

It's historical, for sure.  I think we've discussed changing them and
decided it would be more likely to break things than improve matters.

In particular, modern style would probably be more like "date_style"
etc, but we definitely could not insert underscores without breaking
applications all over the place.  So the best we could do is just
smash to lowercase, eg "datestyle", which isn't really a readability
improvement.  And there would still be some risk of breaking
applications that are expecting these names to print a particular way.

            regards, tom lane


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