Horton

Re: popcount

Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>

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From: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: David Fetter <david@fetter.org>, Daniel Verite <daniel@manitou-mail.org>, PostgreSQL Development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Vik Fearing <vik.fearing@2ndquadrant.com>
Date: 2021-01-19T08:06:00Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On 2021-01-18 16:34, Tom Lane wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com> writes:
>> [ assorted nits ]
> 
> At the level of bikeshedding ... I quite dislike using the name "popcount"
> for these functions.  I'm aware that some C compilers provide primitives
> of that name, but I wouldn't expect a SQL programmer to know that;
> without that context the name seems pretty random and unintuitive.
> Moreover, it invites confusion with SQL's use of "pop" to abbreviate
> "population" in the statistical aggregates, such as var_pop().

I was thinking about that too, but according to 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_weight>, popcount is an accepted 
high-level term, with "pop" also standing for "population".

Commits

  1. Add bit_count SQL function