From: Jeff Davis <jdavis-pgsql@empires.org>
To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 19:55:38 -0800
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On Monday 10 March 2003 10:51 am, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> * XML support?  If we do anything, I'd want some extensible solution to
> allowing multiple query-result output formats from the backend, not an
> XML-specific hack.  For one thing, that would allow the actual appearance
> of any XML support to happen later.

It seems this would also be a good solution to a previous discussion about 
boolean representation.

The postgres output of t/f is perfectly resonable, but can be somewhat 
confusing to someone that relies on PHP's typecasting. In the discussion, 
someone mentioned that if you take in a variable directly from the database 
and cast it to boolean, both 't' and 'f' will cast to true. It turned out to 
be even more confusing because MySQL uses 0/1 which cast properly. 

If I remember correctly, there was even talk of adding a run-time parameter 
similar to the datestyle. If it were all handled in the query-result output 
formatting functions like you suggest, that would seem like a much cleaner 
solution. 

Regards,
	Jeff Davis