Re: Remove name as valid parameter for catalog functions

On 7 March 2011 23:30, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Thom Brown <thom@linux.com> writes:
>> On 7 March 2011 20:49, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>> The reason those are phrased as "OID or name" is that what they take is
>>> regclass, which means that things like pg_total_relation_size('table_name')
>>> do in fact work.  I think the proposed wording would leave people with
>>> the idea that they had to supply a numeric OID, which is a PITA and not
>>> by any means the expected usage.  I agree that maybe the original
>>> wording could use some improvement, but I don't think that just removing
>>> "or name" is an improvement.
>
>> That's fair enough, but it still needs changing, as whilst an OID
>> won't cause an error, a field with the type of name will.  Is it
>> reasonable to refer to a parameter as required to be of type regclass?
>
> Well, the table entries for those functions already show that the
> parameter is of type regclass.  I think the purpose of the text
> descriptions is to help out people who might not immediately get the
> implications of that.
>
> Maybe we could say "the name or OID of a table", or some such phrase,
> so as to subtly avoid the expectation that what is being referred to
> is the datatype named "name"?

Yes, that would remove the ambiguity. :)

--
Thom Brown
Twitter: @darkixion
IRC (freenode): dark_ixion
Registered Linux user: #516935