Re: Bizarre choice of case for RELKIND_PARTITIONED_TABLE

On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 12:55 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Is there a good reason why RELKIND_PARTITIONED_TABLE is 'P' not 'p'?
> It looks rather out of place considering that seven of the eight
> pre-existing relkind codes are lower case. (And no, I don't especially
> approve of RELKIND_SEQUENCE being 'S' either, but it's far too late to
> change that.) Also, in typical low-res monospaced fonts, there's nearly
> no difference except vertical alignment between P and p, meaning that in
> something like
>
> regression=# select distinct relkind from pg_class;
> relkind
> ---------
> r
> t
> P
> v
> m
> i
> S
> c
> (8 rows)
>
> you have to look rather closely even to notice that what you're seeing
> isn't in the case you might expect.
>
> I think we should change this while we still can.

I can't muster a lot of outrage about this one way or another. One
possible advantage of 'P' is that there are fewer places where 'P' is
mentioned in the source code than 'p'.

[rhaas pgsql]$ git grep "'p'" | wc -l
293
[rhaas pgsql]$ git grep "'P'" | wc -l
104

...so it's a little easier to pick out the cases that are talking
about partitioned tables than it would be with a lower case letter.
However, as I say, I don't care very much.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company