Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > "attpos" is a horrid choice of name, because no one will be able to > remember which of "attnum" and "attpos" is which. Pick a more > distinct name. Offhand the best thing I can think of is "attlognum" > or "attlogpos".
Actually, I deliberately chose attpos rather than attlognum (which is what some people had been calling this feature earlier). My reasoning was that the "logical number" is really a nonsensical idea: we just invented it on the spot. In contrast, a "position" is a fairly natural thing for an attribute to have -- it's a notion with some counterpart in the real world. To me, at least, it seems intuitive that an "attnum" would identify a column whereas an "attpos" would specify the column's position. I'm happy to change the name if there's a consensus that attpos isn't a good choice -- what does everyone think? > What are you going to do with deleted columns? I'd be inclined to > give them all attlogpos = 0, but that destroys your last comment. I hadn't planned to do anything in particular for deleted columns: since they are never displayed to the user, does it matter what their attpos is? In any event, the property that no two columns in a table have the same logical number isn't important anyway. > You have not presented any proposal for exactly what ALTER TABLE > operations would be offered to manipulate the column positions. I'd like to get the backend storage side of things implemented first. I'll take a look at the archives before I do any UI work -- thanks for the suggestion. -Neil ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly