Re: functional call named notation clashes with SQL feature

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Florian Pflug <fgp(at)phlo(dot)org> wrote:
> On Jun 1, 2010, at 0:23 , Tom Lane wrote:
>> "David E. Wheeler" <david(at)kineticode(dot)com> writes:
>>> On May 31, 2010, at 8:56 AM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>>>> I don't have strong feelings about the timing - I'd be very surprised if := were to be used in this context for any other purpose, so I don't think we'd be biting ourselves too much by just using that now. But if we do that, we should deprecate use of => as an operator now, and definitely remove its use in hstore either now or in 9.1.
>>
>> My feeling is that (a) there is no hurry to do anything about an
>> unreleased draft of the standard, and (b) perhaps Peter could lobby
>> the committee to change the standard before it does get published.
>>
>> hstore's use of => is pretty well embedded already; waiting another
>> release or two before breaking things is not going to make it
>> significantly more painful.
>
>
> There might be some value in providing an alternative operator though, even if there is no definitive plan to deprecate '=>'.
>
> hstore gained quite a few new features in 9.0 that might attract new users. If there is even a slight chance that '=>' will be deprecated during the next few releases, it'd be nice to save these users the hassle of migration...
>
> For text => text and text[] => text[] I'd propose '||>' as an alternative, since they both combine their arguments, kind of a like a concatenation.
> For hstore => text[] I'd suggest '&>' since the result's set of keys is the intersection of both argument's key-sets.

I was going to propose ==> across the board.

--
Robert Haas
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