Robert Haas wrote:
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 5:19 AM, Dimitri Fontaine <dfonta...@hi-media.com>
wrote:
I think they call that dynamic scope, in advanced programming
language. I guess that's calling for a quote of Greenspun's Tenth Rule:
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common
Lisp.
So the name of the game could be to find out a way to implement (a
limited form of) dynamic scoping in PostgreSQL, in C, then find out all
and any backend local variable that needs that to support autonomous
transactions, then make it happen… Right?
Interestingly, PostgreSQL was originally written in LISP, and there
are remnants of that in the code today; for example, our heavy use of
List nodes. But I don't think that has much to do with this project.
I plan to reserve judgment on the best way of managing the relevant
state until such time as someone has gone to the trouble of
identifying what state that is.
It would probably do Pg some good to try and recapture its functional language
roots where reasonably possible. I believe that, design-wise, functional
languages really are the best way to do object-relational databases, given that
pure functions and immutable data structures are typically the best way to
express anything one would do with them. -- Darren Duncan
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