Re: factorial function/phase out postfix operators?

> On Sep 18, 2020, at 8:29 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
> So I've finished up applying 0001 and started to look at 0002
> ... and I find the terminology you've chosen to be just really
> opaque and confusing. "aliastype" being "implicit" or "explicit"
> is not going to make any sense to anyone until they read the
> manual, and it probably still won't make sense after that.
>
> In the first place, the terminology we use for these things
> is usually "column label", not "alias"; see e.g.
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/queries-select-lists.html#QUERIES-COLUMN-LABELS
> Likewise, gram.y itself refers to the construct as a ColLabel.
> Aliases are things that appear in the FROM clause.
>
> In the second place, "implicit" vs "explicit" just doesn't make
> any sense to me. You could maybe say that the AS is implicit
> when you omit it, but the column label is surely not implicit;
> it's right there where you wrote it.
>
> I confess to not having paid very close attention to this thread
> lately, but the last I'd noticed the terminology proposed for
> internal use was "bare column label", which I think is much better.
> As for what to expose in pg_get_keywords, I think something like
> "label_requires_as bool" would be immediately understandable.
> If you really want it to be an enum sort of thing, maybe the output
> column title could be "collabel" with values "bare" or "requires_AS".
>
> So I'm thinking about making these changes in gram.y:
>
> ImplicitAlias -> BareColLabel
> implicit_alias_keyword -> bare_label_keyword
>
> and corresponding terminology changes elsewhere.

That sounds ok to me.

—
Mark Dilger
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