Message-ID: <502E06DE.7090206@enterprisedb.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2012 11:54:54 +0300
From: Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64;
	rv:10.0.5) Gecko/20120624 Icedove/10.0.5
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
CC: Dmitriy Igrishin <dmitigr@gmail.com>,
	pgsql-docs <pgsql-docs@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Clarification suggestion for 46.4 chapter.
References: 
 <CAAfz9KN4PEf0QodA_F37M6RifK2sMXR8bjAgUqGuNKqOdVchXw@mail.gmail.com>
	<20120817020735.GQ30286@momjian.us>
In-Reply-To: <20120817020735.GQ30286@momjian.us>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

On 17.08.2012 05:07, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Mon, Dec  5, 2011 at 02:53:22PM +0300, Dmitriy Igrishin wrote:
>> Hey,
>>
>> The section 46.4 describes the base data types used in messages.
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/protocol-message-types.html
>>
>> According to section 46.5
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/protocol-message-formats.html
>> there are cases when Int32 can be negative (e.g. see DataRow(B) message
>> description.)
>>
>> Thus, I would like to suggest to change the description of Int(i)
>> from
>> "An n-bit integer in network byte order ..."
>> to
>> "An n-bit signed integer in network byte order ..."
>
> OK, documentation updated.

Actually, in some cases the integers are signed, and in others unsigned. 
For example, in a Bind('F') message, the number of parameters is an 
Int16 according to the docs, but it is treated as unsigned. The maximum 
number of parameters is 65535.

The sentence used to be factually correct, when it didn't mention 
whether they're signed or unsigned. If we want to do better than that, 
we'd need to go through all the mentions of IntN in the docs and 
explicitly say which ones are signed and which ones unsigned. Perhaps 
use Uint16 or Uint32 for the unsigned ones.

-- 
   Heikki Linnakangas
   EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com