Re: CALL versus procedures with output-only arguments

On 6/3/21 4:21 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
>> So AIUI your suggestion is that ALTER/DROP ROUTINE will look for an
>> ambiguity. If it doesn't find one it proceeds, otherwise it complains in
>> which case the user will have to fall back to ALTER/DROP
>> FUNCTION/PROCEDURE. Is that right? It seems a reasonable approach, and I
>> wouldn't expect to find too many ambiguous cases in practice.
> Yeah, I think that practical problems would be pretty rare. My impression
> is that users tend not to use function/procedure name overloading too much
> in the first place, and none of this affects you at all till you do.
>
> Once you do, you'll possibly notice that PG's rules for which combinations
> of signatures are allowed are different from the spec's. I believe that
> we're largely more generous than the spec, but there are a few cases where
> this proposal isn't. An example is that (AFAICT) the spec allows having
> both
> create procedure divide(x int, y int, OUT q int) ...
> create procedure divide(x int, y int, OUT q int, OUT r int) ...
> which I want to reject because they have the same input parameters.
> This is perhaps annoying. But seeing that the spec won't allow you to
> also have divide() procedures for other datatypes, I'm having a hard
> time feeling that this is losing on the overloading-flexibility front.
>
>

Not sure I follow the "other datatypes" bit. Are you saying the spec
won't let you have this?:

create procedure divide(x int, y int, OUT q int);
create procedure divide(x int, y int, OUT q float);

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com