Re: Major problem with custom data type

On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 11:21:24PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> There's nothing obviously wrong in what you posted ... other than the
> very poor style of misspelling "VARHDRSZ" as "4", not using VARDATA and
> VARATT_SIZEP macros, and generally doing your best to ignore every one
> of the portability conventions that are built into the Postgres
> sources.

Do you recommend always using the macros, even if the data is a
structure?  For example, I've done things like the following:

    typedef struct foo
    {
        int32   size;
        int32   numitems;
        float8  item[1];
    } foo;

and then

    foo  *p;

    size = sizeof(*p) + (numitems - 1) * sizeof(p->item);
    p = palloc(size);
    p->size = size;
    p->numitems = numitems;

    for (i = 0; i < numitems; ++i)
        p->item[i] = /* some value */;

I see similar code in arrayfuncs.c.  Is this style safe, or would
you suggest changing the code to use the macros?

--
Michael Fuhr
http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/