From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: =?utf-8?Q?=C3=81lvaro?= Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de>
cc: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>,
        Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>,
        Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: remove bits* types
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Comments: In-reply-to =?utf-8?Q?=C3=81lvaro?= Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de>
	message dated "Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:18:06 +0100"
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Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:41:20 -0400
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=?utf-8?Q?=C3=81lvaro?= Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de> writes:
> Shrug.  As I said in the other thread, it seems mildly useful to
> distinguish the cases where stuff is there solely to be treated as a
> mask of independent bits instead of something you do arithmetic with.

I could get behind that if we were declaring bitmask variables using
bitsNN more or less consistently, but if we do that at all it's a
minority usage.  I didn't even realize there was any such convention.
A lot of the places Nathan is changing don't look like they are
following such a convention anyway.

In short: maybe we don't want to go in the direction Nathan suggests,
but if we keep these types we should make an effort to use them
more consistently, so there's work to be done in that direction too.

			regards, tom lane