On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 10:25 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> > The basic idea being:
> > - Each line is a whole message.
> > - The line begins with <<< for a message received and >>> for a message sent.
>
> +1, though do we really need to repeat the direction marker thrice?
Perhaps not.
> > - Strings in single quotes are those sent/received as a fixed number of bytes.
> > - Strings in double quotes are those sent/received as a string.
> > - 4-byte integers are printed unadorned.
> > - 2-byte integers are prefixed by #.
> > - I guess 1-byte integers would need some other prefix, maybe @ or ##.
>
> I doubt that anybody gives a fig for those distinctions, except when
> they're writing actual code that speaks the protocol --- and I do not
> think that that's the target use-case. So strings and integers seem
> like plenty. I'd also suggest that just because the protocol has
> single-letter codes for message types doesn't mean that average users
> have memorized those codes; and that framing data like the message
> length is of no interest.
I don't agree with that. For one thing, I'm someone, and I give a fig.
I would put it this way: with a very small amount of additional
notation it's possible to preserve the level of detail that we have
currently, and I think that's worth it. Your proposed format for the
sample message I showed is very slightly shorter, which will almost
certainly not matter to anyone, but it leaves some slight ambiguity
about what was happening at the protocol level, which might. If you
don't care, the additional detail in my proposed format is easy enough
to ignore.
--
Robert Haas
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