On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 8:21 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: >>> If we go with the spec's syntax I think we'd have no realistic choice >>> except to forbid => altogether as an operator name. (And no, I'm not >>> for that.) > >> I suppose the most painful thing about doing that is that it would >> break hstore. Are there other commonly-used modules that rely on => >> as an operator name? > > There don't seem to be any other contrib modules that define => as an > operator name, but I'm not sure what's out there on pgfoundry or > elsewhere. The bigger issue to me is not so much hstore itself as that > this is an awfully attractive operator name for anything container-ish. > Wasn't the JSON-datatype proposal using => for an operator at one stage? > (The current wiki page for it doesn't seem to reflect any such idea, > though.) And I think I remember Oleg & Teodor proposing such an > operator in conjunction with some GIN-related idea or other. > >> In spite of the difficulties, I'm reluctant to give up on it. I >> always thought that the "AS" syntax was a crock and I'm not eager to >> invent another crock to replace it. Being compatible with the SQL >> standard and with Oracle is not to be taken lightly. > > Yeah, I know. Though this could end up being one of the bits of the > spec that we politely decline to follow, like upper-casing identifiers. > Still, it's a good idea to think again before we've set the release > in stone ... > > regards, tom lane > > -- > Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) > To make changes to your subscription: > http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers >
I didn't really consider using => for json because it would interfere with hstore (one of the signatures is text => text returns hstore, for instance). I am considering using -> as a json subscript operator (which is what hstore does) as it shouldn't interfere with hstore (as far as I know). Here's a thought: suppose we did use the foo (name => value) syntax for naming parameters. It could still be used in a very similar way for hstore: hstore(key1 => 'value1', key2 => 'value2') One advantage here is that => wouldn't be exclusive to hstore anymore. E.g.: json(key1 => 'value1', key2 => 'value2') However, note that the left hand of => is an identifier here, whereas the left hand of hstore's current => operator is either text, text[], or hstore. If I had to choose between => and := for parameter naming, I'd go with := because it seems more SQLish to me. I wonder if the foo (name : value) syntax would be possible/desirable. Or maybe foo ({name: value}) :-) Joey Adams -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers