On Sat, 2010-07-17 at 09:02 -0500, Robert Haas wrote: > On Jul 16, 2010, at 11:02 PM, Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> wrote: > > * Robert Haas (robertmh...@gmail.com) wrote: > >> Why must the backslash commands be more powerful than any alternative > >> we might come up with? > > > > Because they encode alot of information in a character- something which > > is next to impossible to do in "english". > > I don't think that "terse" and "powerful" are the same thing. One of my beefs > with the backslash commands is that the syntax is not cleanly extensible. We > have S and + as postfix modifiers, and that's fairly comprehensible, but as > soon as you think about going much further with it, it starts to seem like > alphabet soup. > > In fact, we're pretty close to alphabet soup already. Without looking at the > help, what does \db do? What are the commands to list casts, conversions, > and comments, respectively? What syntax would you propose for a backslash > command to list comments, but only those on a certain object type? If you > don't think we should have a backslash command for that, can you write an SQL > query that lists comments on built-in aggregates in less than two minutes? > How many people do you think can do it at all? > > I think "LIST COMMENTS ON SYSTEM AGGREGATES" would be an epic step forward in > usability.
+1 JD > > ...Robert -- PostgreSQL.org Major Contributor Command Prompt, Inc: http://www.commandprompt.com/ - 509.416.6579 Consulting, Training, Support, Custom Development, Engineering -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
