Re: Problems with question marks in operators (JDBC, ECPG, ...)

"Greg Sabino Mullane" <greg(at)turnstep(dot)com> writes:
> Dave Cramer opined:
>> It would seem that choosing ? for operators was ill advised; I'm not
>> convinced that deprecating them is a bad idea. If we start now, in 5 years
>> they should be all but gone

> Ha ha ha ha ha! That's a good one. We still have clients on Postgres 7!
> Five years is way too short to replace something that major.

Yeah, that's a big problem for this line of thought. Even if we had
consensus today, the first release that would actually contain alternative
operators would be 9.6, more than a year out (since 9.5 is past feature
freeze now). It would take several years after that before there would be
any prospect of removing the old ones, and several years more before PG
versions containing the old operators were out of support.

Now there are different ways you could look at this. From the perspective
of a particular end user, you could imagine instituting a shop policy of
not using the operators containing '?' as soon as you had a release where
there were alternatives. So in that context you might have a fix
available as soon as 9.6 came out. But from the perspective of a driver
author who has to support queries written by other people, the problem
would not be gone for at least ten years more. Changing the driver's
behavior sounds like a more practical solution.

regards, tom lane