Joachim Wieland <joe@mcknight.de> writes:
> On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 4:56 PM, Alvaro Herrera
> <alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
>> Why are we using bytea as the output format instead of text?
> It is bytea because it should be thought of "just some data". It
> should be regarded more as a token than as text and should not be
> inspected/interpreted at all. If anybody decides to do so, fine, but
> then they should not rely on the stability of the message format for
> the future.
I don't think that passing it as bytea conveys those semantics at all.
It just makes it harder to look at the value for debugging purposes.
Plus you gotta worry about variable formatting/escaping conventions
(bytea_output etc) that could easily be avoided if the value were
promised to be text with no funny characters in it.
regards, tom lane