Re: psql: Add \dL to show languages

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 8:52 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 7:04 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
>>> I do not like the use of parentheses in the usage description "list
>>> (procedural) languages". Why not have it simply as "list procedural
>>> languages"?
>>
>> Because it lists non-procedural langauges as well? (I didn't check it,
>> that's just a guess)
>
> There are many places in our code and documentation where "procedural
> language" or "language" are treated as synonyms.  There's no semantic
> difference; procedural is simply a noise word.

[bikeshedding]

I agree with Andreas' suggestion that the help string be "list
procedural languages", even though the \dLS output looks something
like this:

List of languages
Procedural Language | Owner | Trusted
---------------------+-------+---------
c | josh | f
internal | josh | f
plpgsql | josh | t
sql | josh | t
(4 rows)

which, as Magnus points out, includes non-procedural languages (SQL).

I think that "list languages" could be confusing to newcomers -- the
very people who might be reading through the help output of psql for
the first time -- who might suppose that "languages" has something to
do with the character sets supported by PostgreSQL, and might not even
be aware that a variety of procedural languages can be used inside the
database.

Josh