Re: functional call named notation clashes with SQL feature

Greg Stark wrote:
> On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > Not breaking hstore, as well as any third-party modules that might be
> > using that operator name. ?Did you not absorb any of the discussion
> > so far?
> >
>
> In fairness most of the discussion about breaking hstore was prior to
> our learning that the sql committee had gone so far into the weeds.
>
> If => is sql standard syntax then perhaps that changes the calculus.
> It's no longer a matter of supporting some oracle-specific syntax that
> diverges from sqlish syntax and conflicts with our syntax. Instead
> it's a question of our operator syntax conflicting with the sql
> standard.
>
> Part of the earlier discussion was about how => was a tempting
> operator name and other users may well have chosen it precisely
> because it's so evocative. But we don't actually have any evidence of
> that. Does anyone have any experience seeing => operators in the wild?

Tangentially, I think the SQL committee chose => because the value, then
variable, ordering is so unintuitive, and I think they wanted that
ordering because most function calls use values so they wanted the
variable at the end.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com