Re: Hook for extensible parsing.

Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> Agreed - it doesn't make sense to me to have a hook that only replaces raw
> parsing, without also hooking into parse-analysis. ISTM that the least a
> patchset going for a parser hook would have to do is to do sufficient
> restructuring so that one could hook together into both raw parsing and
> analysis. It could still be two callbacks, but perhaps we'd ensure that
> they're both set.

The other problem here is that a simple call-this-instead-of-that
top-level hook doesn't seem all that useful anyway, because it leaves
you with the task of duplicating a huge amount of functionality that
you're then going to make some tweaks within. That's already an issue
when you're just thinking about the grammar, and if you have to buy
into it for parse analysis too, I doubt that it's going to be very
practical. If, say, you'd like to support some weird function that
requires special parsing and analysis rules, I don't see how you get
that out of this without first duplicating a very large fraction of
src/backend/parser/.

(As a comparison point, we do have a top-level hook for replacing
the planner; but I have never heard of anyone actually doing so.
There are people using that hook to *wrap* the planner with some
before-and-after processing, which is quite a different thing.)

I don't have any better ideas to offer :-( ... but I very much fear
that the approach proposed here is a dead end.

regards, tom lane