Re: FWD: Re: Updated backslash consistency patch

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 1:09 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> Changing the scope of the search on the basis of whether or not a
>> pattern is present strikes me as a terrible idea. It's confusing and
>> unlikely to make anyone happy.
>
> Huh? The pattern itself "changes the scope of the search", so I don't
> see how this is a conceptual violation.
>
> Not that I'd personally be unhappy with dropping that part of the
> proposal, but this doesn't seem like a good argument against it.

I don't understand your confusion. You're once again proposing to
have \df display only user functions, and \df <pattern> search both
user and system functions. That doesn't seem remotely sane to me.
Now I do "\df"and get a list of 30 functions, and that's more than I
want to wade through so I do "\df a*" and get a list of 60 functions.
Yuck!

I feel pretty strongly that making the pattern search against a
different list of stuff than what the same command would display
without the pattern is confusing and a bad idea. It's a bad idea
regardless of which particular backslash-sequence we're talking about.
It doesn't work that way in 8.3.x, it doesn't work that way in CVS
HEAD, and it seems quite obvious it will confuse and annoy end-users.

...Robert