Re: proposal: alternative psql commands quit and exit

On 12 December 2017 at 13:58, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > I doubt I've ever written just "exit" or "quit" without indentation. I
> > think if it requires them to be a bareword with no indentation, strictly
> > ^(exit|quit)\n when isatty, then that's probably a safe and helpful
> choice.
>
> FWIW, I think that the special behavior (whatever it winds up being
> exactly) ought to trigger on an input line matching
>
> [whitespace]*help[whitespace]*(;[whitespace]*)?
>
> and similarly for exit/quit. I think that novices might have internalized
> enough SQL syntax to think that they need to terminate the command with a
> semicolon --- in fact, we regularly see examples in which seasoned users
> think they need to terminate backslash commands with a semicolon, so
> that's hardly far-fetched. And we might as well allow as much whitespace
> as we can, because nobody but Guido Rossum thinks that having whitespace
> be semantically significant is a good idea.
>
>
Yeah, I think that's fine - and sensible - if we do what Robert proposed
and pass it through to psql's buffer as well as printing some helptext.

It's probably not even that bad if we didn't pass it through, really, as
those lines have little good reason to exist on their own, but I'd rather
not push our luck.

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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