Re: named parameters in SQL functions

On Nov 15, 2009, at 10:54 AM, Greg Stark wrote:

> I'm japh too -- but that doesn't mean grabbing one little aesthetic
> from Perl without copying the whole concept behind it makes any sense.
> Perl sigils are an important part of the language and are a basic part
> of the syntax. They aren't just a "this is a variable" marker.
> Dropping one use of them into a language that doesn't use them
> anywhere else just makes the language into a mishmash.

Well, no, just because we're talking about adopting $var doesn't mean we're trying to turn SQL or PL/pgSQL into Perl. It means that we want to signify that a token is a variable, as opposed to something else (hence “sigil”). That doesn't make it a mishmash unless you think you suddenly have Perl (or shell) semantics, which would be a pretty weird expectation.

> I don't see any purpose to using such markers anyways. We have a
> parser, we have a symbol table, we should use them; these identifiers
> are just like other identifiers.

See the discussion of conflicts with column names in the recent thread. A sigil would eliminate that problem -- and we already have $1 and friends, so this is just an extension of that in my view.

Best,

David