Re: Proposed patch to clean up signed-ness warnings

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Tatsuo Ishii <ishii(at)sraoss(dot)co(dot)jp>
Cc: t-ishii(at)sra(dot)co(dot)jp, pgsql-patches(at)postgreSQL(dot)org, pgsql-hackers(at)postgreSQL(dot)org
Subject: Re: Proposed patch to clean up signed-ness warnings
Date: 2005-09-22 23:46:04
Message-ID: 18088.1127432764@sss.pgh.pa.us
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Tatsuo Ishii <ishii(at)sraoss(dot)co(dot)jp> writes:
>> 1. Can anyone think of a cleaner way to do this?

> 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 *"?
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. Also, it would force us to add a bunch of explicit casts to
avoid warnings with standard library functions like strlen(). 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.

regards, tom lane

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