Re: placeholder syntax

Abhijit Menon-Sen <ams(at)wiw(dot)org> writes:
> Should Postgres accept ? as a placeholder?

We think it's an operator character:

regression=# select 1 ? 4;
ERROR: operator does not exist: integer ? integer

I count eighteen standard operators that would be broken if we changed
'?' to mean a parameter.

I am also pretty unclear on why '?' is a good notation for parameters,
seeing that it is very hard for either the user or the machine to tell
which is which when there are multiple parameters.

In short, I think this notation sucks and I don't want to emulate it.

We do have the :foo notation in ecpg, which may be your closest parallel
for handling Oracle-workalike code anyway.

regards, tom lane