Re: function attributes

On Dec 11, 2010, at 2:27 PM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:

> Yesterday I did a bit of work on allowing bytea values to be passed into and out of plperl in binary format, effectively removing the need to escape and de-escape them. (The work can be seen on he plperlargs branch of my development repo at <https://github.com/adunstan/postgresql-dev/commits/plperlargs/>).

andrew++ # Woo!

> At the moment the behaviour is triggered by a custom setting (plperl.pass_binary_bytea), but this isn't really satisfactory. We could turn it on permanently, but that would break a lot of legacy code. What we really need is a way of marking a function with some attributes. Of course, we could put it in the program text like plpgsql's #variable_conflict, but that's really rather ugly. The grammar already has an attribute mechanism for functions, and ISTM we just need to extend that a bit to allow setting of function attributes reasonably flexibly, much as we can now specify format options on EXPLAIN or we'll soon be able to specify options for foreign table

What does the existing attribute grammar for functions look like? An example perhaps?

Best,

David