Re: What is an item pointer, anyway?

Ashwin Agrawal <aagrawal@pivotal.io> writes:
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 2:19 PM Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
>> ISTM that the
>> least confusing way of removing the ambiguity would be to no longer
>> refer to ItemIds as item pointers, without changing anything else.

How many places would we be changing to clean that up?

> How about we rename ItemPointerData to TupleIdentifier or ItemIdentifier
> instead and leave ItemPointer or Item confined to AM term, where item can
> be tuple, datum or anything else ?

There's half a thousand references to ItemPointer[Data] in our
sources, and probably tons more in external modules.  I'm *not*
in favor of renaming it.

ItemId[Data] is somewhat less widely referenced, but I'm still not
much in favor of renaming that type.  I think fixing comments to
uniformly call it an item ID would be more reasonable.  (We should
leave the "line pointer" terminology in place, too; if memory serves,
an awful lot of variables of the type are named "lp" or variants.
Renaming all of those is to nobody's benefit.)

            regards, tom lane