name vs text vs varchar

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reading through the curent development docs, I've run accross
a data type called "name", and it looks very similar to varchar
or text, and I'm wondering if there is any atvantage to useing
this data type over varchar or even text?

It is used for system catalogs. No reason for users to use it. It is
fixed length 31 or NAMEDATALEN-1, and has no 4-byte length header like
the other text/varchar/char types.

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