Re: proposal sql: labeled function params

"Pavel Stehule" <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:

> 2008/8/17 Hannu Krosing <hannu(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>:
>> On Sun, 2008-08-17 at 08:06 +0200, Pavel Stehule wrote:
>>> 2008/8/16 Decibel! <decibel(at)decibel(dot)org>:
>>> > SQL-like would be value AS name, but I'm not a fan of putting the value
>>> > before the name. And I think value AS name will just lead to a ton of
>>> > confusion.
>>> >
>>> > Since I think it'd be very unusual to do a => (b => c), I'd vote that we
>>> > just go with =>. Anyone trying to do a => b => c should immediately question
>>> > if that would work.
>>>
>>> I'll look on this syntax - what is really means for implementation. I
>>> thing, mostly of us prefer this or similar syntax.
>>
>> Actually the most "natural" syntax to me is just f(name=value) similar
>> to how UPDATE does it. It has the added benefit of _not_ forcing us to
>> make a operator reserved (AFAIK "=" can't be used to define new ops)

This whole thing seems like a ridiculous idea. It's a fancy way of passing an
extra parameter to the function intended to be used for a particular "label"
purpose. Your xml function could just as easily take two functions
f(name,value) instead of using a special spelling for ",".

That it is easily confused with named parameters means there are huge
downsides and no significant up-sides to having this trivial little bit of
syntactic sugar.

To say nothing that using "=>" or anything like that would be just completely
un-SQLish.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
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