Re: Boolean operators without commutators vs. ALL/ANY

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 12:50 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> We deprecated those names for the geometric operators largely because
> there wasn't any visual correlation between the commutator pairs.
> I can't see introducing the same pairing for regex operators if we
> already decided the geometric case was a bad idea.

I'm having trouble avoiding the conclusion that we're trying to shove
a round peg into a square hole. The idea that we have to have a
commutator for every operator just because we don't handle left and
right symmetrically sits poorly with me. I can't really argue with
your statement that it's the easiest way to address Florian's gripe,
but because it almost surely is. But it still feels like a kludge.
The syntax foo = ANY(bar) is really quite a poorly-designed syntax,
because the top-level operation is really "ANY", and it has three
arguments: foo, =, bar. If the SQL committee had standardized on
ANY(foo = $0, bar) or some such thing we wouldn't be having this
conversation.

--
Robert Haas
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