Re: jsonb concatenate operator's semantics seem questionable

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Realistically, as much as we might try to fool ourselves into
> believing otherwise, operators are not self-documenting, except for
> the ones you knew by the fourth grade. People will have to read the
> documentation no matter what we do here. If the documentation is good
> enough, let's improve it. But let's not fool ourselves into believing
> that calling the operator || or + or (in the spirit of this
> discussion) ?!?!?!? will make it clearer. If we wanted to make it
> clearer, we'd have made it a function instead of an operator.

jsonb is based on hstore. I don't want the idiomatic way to do updates
with hstore not work in a similar fashion with jsonb. Granted, if
you're not reading the documentation you may well have other problems,
but I think we should do our best to avoid confusion. I was quite
surprised when I saw that the concatenate operator isn't really useful
for updates. If it wasn't for hstore, then I might agree with Andrew,
or at least not care too much one way or the other. Besides, my
opinion on which operator is at least closer to being self-documenting
is shared by Ryan.

--
Peter Geoghegan