Re: Named arguments in function calls

I agree with Tom on this. Good operator combinations
are hard to find when you are creating new operators.
=> is a particularly good one.

Barring any override from the SQL200x standard,
I would strongly suggest AS, too.

elein
elein(at)varlena(dot)com

On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 02:54:12PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> >> I've been looking (and coded) a little bit on named function calls.
> >> Calls on the form:
> >>
> >> foo (x => 13, y => 42)
> >>
> >> Implementing this means that the symbol => no longer can be defined
> >> by the user as an operator. It's not used as default in pg, but I
> >> just want to tell you up front in case you don't like that.
>
> > Is it really necessary to steal it? There's some precedent for special cases
> > in argument lists: "," is an operator in C yet it has special meaning in
> > function arguments.
>
> I'm not happy with the concept of "reserved operator names", either.
> I think a little more work ought to be put into the grammar to see if
> we can match Oracle's syntax without reserving the operator, and if we
> can't, choose a different syntax using a keyword instead of an operator.
> One that comes to mind immediately is AS:
>
> foo (13 as x, 42 as y)
>
> AS is already a fully reserved word, so this wouldn't break any existing
> applications. Furthermore it seems to fit more naturally with SQL
> syntax in general --- you could see this as equivalent to the column
> renaming that AS does in a SELECT list.
>
> I've never been impressed with the concept of copying Oracle just
> because they're Oracle. This seems like a case where they've chosen
> an unfortunate syntax that we should not break things to emulate.
>
> BTW, has anyone looked to see whether SQL 200x has pre-empted this
> decision yet?
>
> regards, tom lane
>
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