Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 11:48 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Possibly the former names should survive and the latter become
>> wrappers around them, not sure. But we shouldn't be using the "4B"
>> terminology anyplace except this part of postgres.h.
> I would argue that it shouldn't be used any place at all, and that we
> ought to go the other direction and get rid of the existing macros -
> e.g. change #define VARATT_IS_1B_E to #define VARATT_IS_EXTERNAL
> instead of defining the latter as a no-value-added wrapper around the
> former. Maybe at one time somebody thought that the test for
> VARATT_IS_EXTERNAL might someday have more cases than just
> VARATT_IS_1B_E, but that's not looking like a good bet in 2021.
Maybe. I think the original idea was exactly what the comment says,
to have a layer of macros that'd deal with endianness issues and no more.
That still seems like a reasonable plan to me, though perhaps it wasn't
executed very well.
regards, tom lane
