On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Jeff Davis <pg...@j-davis.com> wrote: > On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 21:23 -0500, Tom Lane wrote: >> Or maybe forget about it and go to EXCLUDE or EXCLUDING? > > I left it as EXCLUSION for now. "EXCLUDING USING ..." and "EXCLUSIVE > USING ..." both sound a little awkward to me. Either could be improved > by moving the USING clause around, but that just creates more grammar > headaches. > > EXCLUDE probably flows most nicely with the optional USING clause or > without. My only complaint was that it's a transitive verb, so it seems > to impart more meaning than it actually can. I doubt anyone would > actually be more confused in practice, though. If a couple of people > agree, I'll change it to EXCLUDE.
Personally, I think that this is all rather a matter of opinion, and of course bikeshedding. CHECK is a verb, which might suggest that EXCLUDE is the best choice, and it has a nice declarative sound to it. But the other example is FOREIGN KEY, which is not a verb at all, which seems to me to more closely parallel EXCLUSION or perhaps EXCLUDING. I think I like EXCLUSIVE the least of the four, but at the end of the day, I don't think we can really go far wrong. I also don't think there's anything wrong with EXCLUDING USING, nor anything more wrong EXCLUSIVE USING than there is with EXCLUSIVE alone. Nor do I think there's any problem with EXCLUDE being transitive because, of course, we're going to follow it with a description of what we want to exclude, which may be thought of as its direct object. Once again, I don't think we can go far wrong. Honestly, I'd probably be in favor of breaking the virtual tie in favor of whichever word is already a keyword, rather than trying to decide on (IMHO extremely tenuous) grammatical grounds. But I can't get worked up about that one way or the other either. ...Robert -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
