Re: PL/pgSQL 2

On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 5:45 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> What is actually being proposed, AFAICS, is a one-shot fix for a bunch
> of unfortunate choices. That might be worth doing, but let's not fool
> ourselves about whether it's one-shot or not.

I'm glad to hear you think it *might* be worth doing.
A one-shot is exactly what it is, like a new major version of postgres
itself (but a new major version of postgres has a much longer release
note of changes :).
Once released, there is obviously no way to include new non-backwards
compatible code in future minor versions.

I guess it boils down to if the project can agree on if there are any
significant *important* changes worth doing that are *not* possible or
feasible to implement in plpgsql.

I see two possible approaches of a plpgsql2 project, both aiming to
require minimal/no changes of most existing best-practice plpgsql
code:
a) fork plpgsql code base and implement changes with as few lines of
code as possible, making it easier to understand the changes, verify
their correctness and apply future patches of the plpgsql code.
b) fork plpgsql code and remove as much code as possible thanks to the
reduced complexity possible thanks to the stricter behaviour achieved
by removing settings and enforcing a stricter coding convention and
killing obsolete quirks.

Given plpgsql2 is a one-shot, the time window to gather input of what
non-compatible changes to include probably needs to be at least a
year.
During that period, the mostly-compatible changes discussed could be
implemented, which are the ones I'm personally most interested in
anyway, but if we are creating a new language, then naturally we
should take the chance to include all important changes we wish we
could do but cannot with plpgsql.