Re: bool: symbol name collision

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> The problem with the bool type is that it could have different sizes on
> different systems.  Which will lead to problems.  I doubt that that
> problem exists with int4.
>

I could imagine macros that do the wrong thing if the types they use
inside them have the wrong signedness...

I tihnk the reasons bool is particularly eggregious are a) we have
these misleading #ifdefs that don't do the right thing and b) there's
a stdbool.h making it hard for c99 programmers to avoid doing the
wrong thing. The other types are part of the postgres server interface
and module writers should just avoid redefining them -- if they do
they'll get errors. I think it would be nice to make that better but
at least they won't be silently redefining the postgres interfaces to
potentially incorrect definitions.

--
greg