Re: Macros for time magic values

On 03/14/2011 09:25 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 4:22 AM, Simon Riggs<simon@2ndquadrant.com>  wrote:
>> On Sat, 2011-03-12 at 22:29 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>>> On fre, 2011-03-11 at 12:50 -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>>>> It has bothered me that many of our time routines use special magic
>>>> constants for time values, e.g. 24, 12, 60, etc.
>>>>
>>>> The attached patch changes these magic constants to macros to clarify
>>>> the code.  I would like to apply this for 9.1 as a cleanup.
>>> I think it's much clearer with the plain numbers.
>> Yeh. It's not like the values 24, 12 or 60 were going to change.
> I had the same thought.


I think the advantage is that it's much harder to mistype a symbolic 
constant and not have it noticed than to mistype a number literal and 
not have it noticed. It's debatable whether this advantage is worth the 
loss in clarity in the case of very well known values such as seconds 
per minute.

cheers

andrew