Re: [HACKERS] PL/pgSQL a great procedural language for PostgreSQL

Thomas G. Lockhart wrote:
>
> > For arguments passed by value it
> > is totally impossible to know if it's a NULL by looking at
> > the value itself.
>
> Is this a sufficient reason to move toward having all user-oriented data
> types be pass-by-reference? If we don't do that, then we would need to
> pass a null flag for every parameter, or an array of flags, or have some
> global array which contains the null flags (which we might get away with
> since Postgres is pretty much single threaded and non-reentrant in the
> backend code). What other options might there be?

Perhaps make the isNull flag a bitmap ?

In case it is an int (I haven't looked), we get room for flagging 32
arguments

Also I hope that most current code will run unchanged, in case it tests
for
0 / not 0

----------------
Hannu