Re: language interface in postgresql

On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 01:10:15AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Scott Marlowe" <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > On 8/14/07, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> >> ... I think we probably are unique in being so aggressively
> >> agnostic about what the function language is. That's not
> >> necessarily all good, as it's driven us to invent curiosities
> >> like dollar-quoting to avoid having to mesh lexical details of
> >> the function language and the outer SQL language.
>
> > Well, I for one LOVE $$ quoting in the newer versions of pgsql.
> > Having statements with ''''''''value'''''''' in the, was downright
> > annoying in 7.4...
>
> You bet, but the reason why it was like that was we insisted on the
> function body being a string literal in the eyes of the outer CREATE
> FUNCTION command. Anytime the function's language had the same
> ideas about string quoting and escaping rules as the outer SQL
> language does, you were in for some recursively bad experiences.
>
> Dollar-quoting is a cute technical solution to that, but you can't
> deny that it's simpler if you just restrict the function language to
> be SQL-ish so that CREATE FUNCTION can parse it without any
> interesting quoting rules. So sayeth Oracle and the SQL standards
> committee, anyway.

I think the aforementioned entities got it wrong where we got it right :)

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666
Skype: davidfetter

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