Re: Lexing with different charsets

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Yeah. I'm not sure that we're ever going to support that part of the
>> spec; doing so would break too many useful things without adding very
>> much useful functionality.

> Like what?

The first things that came to mind were losing psql's ability to tell
what's a literal, losing the existing capability for queries to be
translated from client-side to server-side character set, and losing the
capability to have character sets defined by plug-in extensions rather
than being hard-wired into the lexer. (Before you claim that the last
is easily solved, consider that the lexer is not allowed to do database
accesses.)

> I think it could be fairly useful. We would have to
> restrict ourselves to character sets that are supersets of ASCII, but
> there are boatloads of reasons to do that besides this issue.

If we do that then some of the problems go away, but I'm not sure they
all do. Are you willing to drop support for non-ASCII-superset
character sets on the client side as well as the server?

regards, tom lane