Re: pg_get_viewdefs() indentation considered harmful

On 01/25/2014 11:06 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 8:53 PM, Greg Stark <stark(at)mit(dot)edu> wrote:
>>> Indeed even aside from the performance questions, once you're indented
>>> 5-10 times the indention stops being useful at all. The query would
>>> probably be even more readable if we just made indentation modulo 40
>>> so once you get too far indented it "wraps around" which is not unlike
>>> how humans actually indent things in this case.
>> Ha! That seems a little crazy, but *capping* the indentation at some
>> reasonable value might not be dumb.
> I could go for either of those approaches, if applied uniformly, and
> actually Greg's suggestion sounds a bit better: it seems more likely
> to preserve some readability in deeply nested constructs.
>
> With either approach you need to ask where the limit value is going
> to come from. Is it OK to just hard-wire a magic number, or do we
> need to expose a knob somewhere?
>
>

Simply capping it is probably the best bang for the buck. I suspect most
people would prefer to have "q1 union q2 union q3 union q4" with the
subqueries all indented to the same level. But I understand the
difficulties in doing so.

A knob seems like overkill. I'd just hardwire some number, say three or
four levels of indentation.

cheers

andrew