On 5/7/18, Mark Dilger <hornschnor...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hackers, > > Have you already considered and rejected the idea of having > genbki.pl/Catalog.pm define constants that can be used in > the catalog .dat files? I'm mostly curious if people think > the resulting .dat files are better or worse using constants > of this sort. For example: ... > + # pg_cast constants for castcontext > + use constant IMPLICIT => 'i'; > + use constant ASSIGNMENT => 'a'; > + use constant EXPLICIT => 'e';
The comment refers to pg_cast, but these constants apply globally. It's also not the right place from a maintainability perspective, and if it was, now these values have different macros defined in two places. This is not good. > - castcontext => 'a', castmethod => 'f' }, > + castcontext => ASSIGNMENT, castmethod => FUNCTION }, For one, this breaks convention that the values are always single-quoted. If you had a use case for something like this, I would instead use the existing lookup infrastructure and teach genbki.pl to parse the enums (or #defines as the case might be) in the relevant header file. You'd need some improvement in readability to justify that additional code, though. I don't think this example quite passes (it's pretty obvious locally what the letters refer to), but others may feel differently. -John Naylor
