Re: pgbench - allow backslash-continuations in custom scripts

Fabien,

> Without a lexer it is possible to fool pgbench with somehow contrived
> examples, say with:
>
> SELECT 'hello;
> world';
>
> The ";" within the string will be considered as end-of-line.
>
> Also, comments intermixed with sql on the same line would generate errors.
>
> SELECT 1 -- one
> + 3;
>
> Would fail, but comments on lines of their own are ok.
>
> It may be argued that these are not a likely scripts and that this
> behavior could be declared as a "feature" for keeping the code simple.

Yeah, these seem pretty contrived. I would personally be OK with
breaking them.

> ISTM that it would be an overall improvement, but also the ;-termination
> requirement breaks backward compatibility.

Look, how many people in the world develop their own pgbench scripts?
And how many of those aren't on this list right now, reading this
thread? I expect I could count them on my fingers and toes.
Backwards-compatability for pgdump, pg_basebackup, initdb, etc. matters.
The worst case with pgbench is that we break two people's test scripts,
they read the release notes, and fix them.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com