Unexpected behavior of DROP VIEW/TABLE IF EXISTS

On Tuesday, June 26, 2018, Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> 2018-06-26 17:23 GMT+02:00 Peter Moser <pitiz29a(at)gmail(dot)com>:
>
>> Hi,
>> I want to delete a table X, that may not exist, hence I execute
>>
>> DROP TABLE IF EXISTS X;
>>
>> However, if X is a view, I get an error
>>
>> ERROR: "X" is not a table
>>
> HINT: Use DROP VIEW to remove a view.
>> SQL state: 42809
>>
>> That is unexpected and also difficult to handle
>>
>
> DROP TABLE should to remove table and nothing else, like DROP VIEW should
> to drop just view and nothing else. It is safeguard.
>

Peter isn't asking for drop table to drop a view though, he's asking for
the documented behavior:

"Do not throw an error if the table does not exist. A notice is issued in
this case."

There is no Table named X in the database so the command should be a noop
with a notice. I would concur, though I'm open to just fixing it in v12
and back patching a documentation bug fix stating the exception due to
relations sharing a namespace but there be lacking a corresponding shared
namespace "drop relation" command.

David J.