> I guess, your patch would not be much different; you can still have > all the nice names and assign the appropriate values to the enum > values same as now, but using an enum you might also gain > type-checking in the code and also get warnings for the "switch" > statements if there are any cases accidentally omitted.
Hmm, I think omitting a 'default' clause (which is needed when you want warnings for missing clauses) in a switch that handles protocol traffic is not great, because the switch would misbehave when the network counterpart sends a broken message. I'm not sure we want to do that. It could become a serious security problem if confronted with a malicious libpq.