Parsing of VIEW definitions - Mailing list pgsql-general

I'm just curious...

If you have a view:
    create foo_view as select * from foo;

Then you query it:
    select * from foo_view;

What, behind the scenes, actually happens?

Is the definition of "foo_view" looked up in the system catalog, query
rewritten, parsed, then executed?

In other words, does the query *literally* get rewritten as:
    select * from (select * from foo) as foo;
before it is parsed?

eric