Re: GSOC13 proposal - extend RETURNING syntax

On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 06:28:53PM +0200, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2013-05-02 12:23:19 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Marko Tiikkaja <marko(at)joh(dot)to> writes:
> > > What I'm more interested in is: how can we make this feature work in
> > > PL/PgSQL where OLD means something different?
> >
> > That's a really good point: if you follow this approach then you're
> > creating fundamental conflicts for use of the feature in trigger
> > functions or rules, which will necessarily have conflicting uses of
> > those names. Yeah, we could define scoping rules such that there's
> > an unambiguous interpretation, but then the user is just out of luck
> > if he wants to reference the other definition. (This problem is
> > probably actually worse if you implement with reserved words rather
> > than aliases.)
> >
> > I'm thinking it would be better to invent some other notation for access
> > to old-row values.
>
> prior/after? Both are unreserved keywords atm and it seems far less
> likely to have conflicts than new/old.

BEFORE/AFTER seems more logical to me. Yes, those words both have
meaning in, for example, a trigger definition, but they're clearly
separable by context.

Yay, bike-shedding!

Cheers,
David.
--
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