On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
Gurjeet Singh <singh.gurjeet@gmail.com> writes: > Is there a reason why Postgres chose to not use all lowercase characters > for these parameters' names.
> DateStyle > IntervalStyle > TimeZone
It's historical, for sure. I think we've discussed changing them and decided it would be more likely to break things than improve matters.
In particular, modern style would probably be more like "date_style" etc, but we definitely could not insert underscores without breaking applications all over the place. So the best we could do is just smash to lowercase, eg "datestyle", which isn't really a readability improvement. And there would still be some risk of breaking applications that are expecting these names to print a particular way.
Can we develop aliases to these parameters, that adhere to the standard. Next release we can mark the old ones as deprecated and a few releases down the line completely remove the non-stsandard names and rest easy.
Would be happy to contribute such a patch. I think it'd be trivial.