Re: GSOC13 proposal - extend RETURNING syntax

On 03/05/13 04:52, David Fetter wrote:
> 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.
I prefer 'PRIOR & 'AFTER' as the both have the same length
- but perhaps that is just me! :-)

Cheers,
Gavin