> > For me, your patche seems to be a retrogression. In my understanding, > > the reason why PostgreSQL uses "char *" in many places is just it was > > designed in the old days when ASCII was the only charset in the world. > > Are you proposing that we change all the "char *" to "unsigned char *"?
No, I suggest we change all "char *" to "unsigned char *" only where it points a string which could hold non ASCII character strings. I thought we learned the danger of 1) comparing chars with signed bit on, 2) passing chars with sign bit on to functions which expect int etc... > I looked at that briefly but it seems like a huge loss, both in > notational ugliness and in the amount of code that would have to be > touched. If you are just care the amount of effort, why don't you leave as it is and use pre v4 gcc? :-) > Also, it would force us to add a bunch of explicit casts to > avoid warnings with standard library functions like strlen(). Counter examples could be easily found in isalpha(), toupper() etc. > To me the > bottom line is that 99% of the code only needs to know that a character > string is a character string. As this patch demonstrates, there is only > a tiny fraction that needs to have the "unsigned" declaration. I don't > think we should allow that fraction to dictate a notational burden for > all the rest. To support multiple charsets/collataions, I think we need to change the way to represent character strings from the unstructured "char *" to more intelligent structure (I know it's hard to implement that without significant performance loss, but I know we should do it in the future). So "unsigned char*" is not enough for the goal anyway, I'm not against your patches. -- SRA OSS, Inc. Japan Tatsuo Ishii ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings