On 23 June 2011 00:37, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
> Hm. I have to say the single most confusing thing about the Postgres
> source that took me a *long* time to get over was remembering that
> some of the typedefs were already pointers and some weren't. It seems
> silly now but when I was trying to understand what the intent of a
> function was and it wasn't obvious that some of the arguments appeared
> to be pass by value but were actually pass by reference it made things
> really surprising.
I agree that the inconsistency is annoying. If we were starting from
scratch, I'd encourage abandoning the convention. It's a leaky
abstraction.
At the risk of saying something that will raise eyebrows, I'll point
out that the win32 API follows a similar practice. The difference is
that they have consistent conventions in how they name their typdefs,
so that you get to learn the patterns.
--
Peter Geoghegan http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
