I'd like to make it possible to perform function calls in PL/PgSQL without needing to use PERFORM. I think this would be useful because (a) it is closer to how PL/SQL works (b) PERFORM is (IMHO) a kludge, and making it unnecessary would make programming in PL/PgSQL more natural.
Attached is a proof of concept patch that implements this. With this patch, you can now write functions like so: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION some_func() RETURNS INT AS 'BEGIN call_some_function(); RETURN 5; END; ' LANGUAGE 'plpgsql'; Known issues with the patch: (1) It seems to induce an intermittent segfault in the regression tests on one of my machines (but not any others) which I need to fix. (2) We should probably allow the name of a function to be double-quoted so that it is possible to call functions with unusual names (mixed-case and so on). I believe this should be possible, I just haven't implemented it yet. (3) The parser must distinguish between two cases when it sees an unknown word (T_WORD) beginning a statement. The word could be the beginning of a SQL statement (stmt_execsql in the grammar), such as: UPDATE ...; or the name of a function in a function call: invoke_func(...); The patch currently distinguishes between these cases by looking at the next token -- if it is a left parenthesis, the patch assumes it is a function call, otherwise it assumes it is a SQL statement. Is this the best approach? (Another method would be to teach the PL/PgSQL lexer about the basic SQL keywords like UPDATE, INSERT, and so on, and then distinguish the two cases that way. This would impose a maintenance burden when new SQL commands are added, so I didn't adopt this approach.) (4) This is proof-of-concept, so there's some mopup I still need to do (for example, more extensive regression tests, and consider whether it is better to reuse PLpgSQL_stmt_perform or to invent a new statement type for this feature, update the docs, etc.) Any comments? -Neil ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
