Re: WIP: default values for function parameters

Pavel Stehule wrote:
> >
> > How would a user recognise which of these are legal operator names?
> >
> > Incidentally -- EDB selling Oracle compatibility may put me in a questionable
> > position here -- the more Oracle incompatibilities in stock Postgres the
> > better for us. But afaik we don't emulate => anyways so that hardly matters.
> > If anything it shows how unimportant it is to worry about being compatible on
> > this front.
> >
>
> I don't search compatibility - just searching any good syntax. And
> Oracle used wide used syntax - from Ada, Perl. - It isn't Oracle
> patent or Oracle design. And named params hasn't big sense without
> default params. So now is time for speaking about it.
>
> look on ADA http://archive.adaic.com/standards/83rat/html/ratl-08-03.html
>
> PL/pgSQL < PL/SQL < ADA so using '=>' is only consistent and natural.
> And it is my goal.

Well, that is interesting, but in SQL we already use 'AS' in most places
where we want to assign a label to a value, so it seems AS is more
logical for SQL at this point.

The problem with a GUC is that when it is changed it breaks things and
it might be set in a dump file but not in postgresql.conf; there is a
long list of problems we have encountered when changing SQL semenatics
via GUC, autocommit being one of them.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +