Re: Issues for named/mixed function notation patch

On Wed, 2009-10-07 at 18:17 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> No, that's not what I'm driving at. The small change that I've got in
> mind would require you to say VARIADIC, but it would allow the function
> to match both the above call and
> foo(a AS x, c AS z, VARIADIC b AS y)
> when really z is the variadic parameter in this case. I'm not sure if
> this would bother anyone or not. It seems impossible that a function
> could ever have more than one variadic parameter, so there's not really
> any ambiguity from maintaining the syntactic rule that the VARIADIC
> keyword is at the end even when the variadic argument isn't, but it
> might look a bit odd.

I'm worried about allowing such strange notation. Someone might have a
new idea later that conflicts with it, and then we have a
backwards-compatibility problem.

> What I *don't* want to do is fix this by allowing/requiring
> foo(a AS x, VARIADIC c AS z, b AS y)
> because it would be a bigger change in the grammar output structure than
> seems warranted.

If it's the "right" thing to do (or might be the right thing to do),
someone will want to do that later, and that would be incompatible with
the:

foo(a AS x, c AS z, VARIADIC b AS y)

notation (where z is the variadic parameter).

> We could possibly have VARIADIC throw an error if the
> named argument that matches to the variadic parameter isn't the last
> one, but I'm not sure that that's important rather than just pedantry.

I would prefer such a restriction if it's reasonable to do.

Regards,
Jeff Davis