Re: Can the string literal syntax for function definitions please be dropped ?

Timothy Madden escribió:
> On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 12:42 AM, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com
> > wrote:
>
> > Timothy Madden escribió:
> >
> > > Anyway Posgres offers a CREATE FUNCTION statement that resembles
> > > or should resemble that in the standard, and that is what I am
> > > talking about.
> >
> > "Should" being the operative word in that sentence. If you want to
> > submit a patch to move us closer towards the SQL/PSM goal, I'm sure it
> > will be welcome.
>
> You know that takes quite some effort to invest. How are you sure a patch
> for this will be welcome when people here mostly disagree with me ?

Because you're wielding the wrong argument :-)

> > I just want the Postgres version of the statement to look more like
> > the standard one.
> >
> > Sure. If we weren't all pointing in that general direction, we would
> > probably have CONNECT BY instead of WITH RECURSIVE.
>
> I don't understand, what CONNECT BY or WITH RECURSIVE ?

CONNECT BY is Oracle's way of implementing recursive queries. We had a
patch for that for years, but it was rejected over and over on various
grounds, one of which was that it was not the standard's spelling of the
feature. We only got recursive queries when somebody was willing to
bite the bullet and write it in WITH RECURSIVE form.

My point here was: we definitely support the standard. We don't do the
string literal bit for functions just because we like to be different.
We do it because our extensibility features require it. Of course,
SQL/PSM is a different beast than all the rest of the PLs, because it is
standard, so I am sure that we will want to implement the standard
syntax (no string literal) when we have SQL/PSM. But implementing no-
string-literals before we get full SQL/PSM support would be pointless,
because there are so many other things that are not standard in that
area. Simply removing the quotes (which is what you are requesting)
would not take our standards compliance much further.

--
Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.