Re: BUG #1329: Bug in IF-ELSEIF-ELSE construct

On Sat, 2004-11-27 at 12:55 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> This seems like the most appropriate answer to me; I was thinking of
> doing that earlier when Fabien and I were fooling with plpgsql error
> reporting, but didn't get around to it.

Attached is a patch that implements a rough draft of this (it also
includes an improved version of the "unreachable code" patch that
includes your suggested fixes). Two questions about the patch:

(1) It doesn't report syntax errors in unreachable code. I suppose this
ought to be done, right?

(2) The syntax error message is wrong (we print a character offset and
query context that is relative to the CREATE FUNCTION statement, not the
individual SQL statement we're executing). I fooled around a bit with
defining a custom ereport() callback to print the right line number and
query context, but I couldn't get it right. Do you have any guidance on
the proper way to do this.

> As long as you only do this in check_function_bodies mode it seems
> safe enough. One possible problem (if it's done towards the end of
> parsing as you've suggested for dead-code checking) is that a syntax
> error in a SQL statement might confuse the plpgsql parser into
> misparsing statement boundaries, which could lead to a plpgsql parse
> error much further down, such as a "missing END" at the end of the
> function. The error would be more useful if reported immediately
> after the putative SQL statement is parsed. Not sure if that's
> hard or not. (The same remark applies to dead code checking, now
> that I think about it.)

In the case of dead code checking, I don't think it matters. Doing the
syntax check in gram.y might be a better idea, I'll take a look doing
that...

-Neil