On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> If we do want to go >> with a single flag character, maybe it should just be a single or >> double quote: > >> :'foo - quote as a literal >> :"foo - quote as an ident > > I would've proposed that myself if I thought it would work, but I'm > afraid that it will wreak complete chaos from a parsing standpoint. > Half the tools in the world will think this is an incomplete literal, > and I'm not even very sure you could keep psql itself from getting > confused. > > Hmm ... actually, though, what about combining the ideas: > > :'foo' - quote as a literal > :"foo" - quote as an ident > > This leaves us with nothing much as far as extensibility, but from > a mnemonic standpoint it's a large win.
Works for me. One small problem discussed upthread is that there currently doesn't appear to be a libpq function that does ident-quoting. I'm thinking that we will need to add one to make this work - is that going to be a problem? I'm thinking that since we're just adding a function it won't force an uncomfortable major-version bump on libpq. I guess the other thing that is bad about this is that someone might be forgiven for thinking that quotation marks were the way to include a space in the variable name. But that may be a downside that we can just live with. ...Robert -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
