Re: Why some GUC parameter names are not lowercased

Gurjeet Singh <singh.gurjeet@gmail.com> writes:
> Is there a reason why Postgres chose to not use all lowercase characters
> for these parameters' names.
>  DateStyle
>  IntervalStyle
>  TimeZone

It's historical, for sure.  I think we've discussed changing them and
decided it would be more likely to break things than improve matters.

In particular, modern style would probably be more like "date_style"
etc, but we definitely could not insert underscores without breaking
applications all over the place.  So the best we could do is just
smash to lowercase, eg "datestyle", which isn't really a readability
improvement.  And there would still be some risk of breaking
applications that are expecting these names to print a particular way.

            regards, tom lane