Re: massive quotes?

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003, Tom Lane wrote:

> It is possible that we could allow the start marker to be not at the
> beginning of its line, which would create structures very very close
> to shell here-documents:
>
> CREATE FUNCTION foo() RETURNS int AS $$FUNCTION
> ... text here ...
> $$FUNCTION
>
> This would be a little more open to typos --- if you leave out the space
> so that it reads
>
> CREATE FUNCTION foo() RETURNS int AS$$FUNCTION
>
> then you wrote an identifier, not AS followed by a here-document marker.
> But it might be worth defining it that way anyway because of the
> similarity to shell notation. Or maybe I'm assuming too much about
> whether the average SQL programmer has ever heard of shell
> here-documents.

Perl's adopting shell here-document syntax has made them pretty well-known
even outside of Unix, but if we diverge at all we'd might as well do what
makes the most sense for PostgreSQL. I think your proposal above is good,
at least enough to write code for and test with.

Jon