Re: proposal: more practical view on function's source code

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 4:35 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> I'm not sure that Pavel's idea is the right way to attack the problem,
>> but I don't agree with this either.  Line numbers are really the only
>> feasible way of identifying a position in a large function.  I usually
>> bring up the function source code in vi and then use j with a repeat
>> count to find the offending line.  It's not uncommon for me to have
>> various places in the function that look somewhat similar, so
>> expecting me to find the right place other than by the line number
>> would not work very well for me.
>
> I'm certainly not proposing removing the line number from error
> messages.  I'm just saying that I see no value in the proposed psql \df
> change for this purpose.
>
> The direction that we ought to be pushing in, I think, is the same as
> the vision for syntax error handling: enable pgAdmin and similar tools
> to pop up the function text with a cursor placed at (more or less) the
> right place.  It's interesting to think about how that might be extended
> to lower-tech solutions like \ef.  I could see telling people to type
>        \ef function-name line-number
> with suitable magic to get the editor to place the cursor at that line.
> I suspect this wouldn't be too hard to do with emacs --- what do you
> think about vi?

Well, in vi you can just do "vi +linenum filename".

...Robert