I agree with Tom on this. Good operator combinations are hard to find when you are creating new operators. => is a particularly good one.
Barring any override from the SQL200x standard, I would strongly suggest AS, too. elein [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 02:54:12PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > Greg Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> I've been looking (and coded) a little bit on named function calls. > >> Calls on the form: > >> > >> foo (x => 13, y => 42) > >> > >> Implementing this means that the symbol => no longer can be defined > >> by the user as an operator. It's not used as default in pg, but I > >> just want to tell you up front in case you don't like that. > > > Is it really necessary to steal it? There's some precedent for special cases > > in argument lists: "," is an operator in C yet it has special meaning in > > function arguments. > > I'm not happy with the concept of "reserved operator names", either. > I think a little more work ought to be put into the grammar to see if > we can match Oracle's syntax without reserving the operator, and if we > can't, choose a different syntax using a keyword instead of an operator. > One that comes to mind immediately is AS: > > foo (13 as x, 42 as y) > > AS is already a fully reserved word, so this wouldn't break any existing > applications. Furthermore it seems to fit more naturally with SQL > syntax in general --- you could see this as equivalent to the column > renaming that AS does in a SELECT list. > > I've never been impressed with the concept of copying Oracle just > because they're Oracle. This seems like a case where they've chosen > an unfortunate syntax that we should not break things to emulate. > > BTW, has anyone looked to see whether SQL 200x has pre-empted this > decision yet? > > regards, tom lane > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command > (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
