Re: WITH ORDINALITY versus column definition lists

Dean Rasheed <dean(dot)a(dot)rasheed(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On 20 November 2013 22:46, Andrew Gierth <andrew(at)tao11(dot)riddles(dot)org(dot)uk> wrote:
> "Tom" == Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>> Tom> 1. Reinsert HEAD's prohibition against directly combining WITH
>> Tom> ORDINALITY with a coldeflist (with a better error message and a
>> Tom> HINT suggesting that you can get what you want via the TABLE
>> Tom> syntax).
>>
>> That gets my vote.

> Yeah that seems preferable to option #2, which just seems to open up a
> whole can of worms.

> However, I think I would quickly find it a PITA that it kept telling
> me to wrap it in a TABLE() construct. It would seem like the "TABLE"
> was just an unnecessary noise word (from a user perspective). Could we
> simply support an alias list after the ORDINALITY, in addition to the
> coldeflist?

This seems like way too much complication to save a couple of keystrokes
in a corner case. Two separate AS clauses applying to the same FROM
item seems mighty confusing to me ...

regards, tom lane