Re: functional call named notation clashes with SQL feature

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.

best regards,
Florian Pflug