Re: proposal: plpgsql - Assert statement

On 11/18/14, 9:31 AM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> Frankly, I find this whole proposal, and all the suggested alternatives, somewhat ill-conceived. PLPGSQL is a wordy language. If you want something more terse, use something else. Adding these sorts of syntactic sugar warts onto the language doesn't seem like a terribly good way to proceed.

Such as?

The enormous advantage of plpgsql is how easy it is to run SQL. Every other PL I've looked at makes that WAY harder. And that's assuming you're in an environment where you can install another PL.

And honestly, I've never really found plpgsql to be terribly wordy except in a few cases ("assert" being one of them). My general experience has been that when I'm doing an IF (other than assert), I'm doing multiple things in the IF block, so it's really not that big a deal.

As for why not do this in a separate function; yes, you can do that. But then you've needlessly added to your context stack, it's going to be a lot slower, and you can only really replace RAISE's functionality if you're in a version that has format().

If someone has another brain-flash on how to make this better I'm all ears. But I don't think arguments like "use another PL" or "it's just syntax sugar" improve things for our users.
--
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting
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