RE: syntax error with alter type

Tom Lane wrote:

> Kevin Brannen <KBrannen(at)efji(dot)com> writes:
> > So, can you (or anyone) help me understand what "alter type <type> drop attribute" is meant to do? I don't see "attribute" on the page you reference.

> IIRC, that drops a column from a composite type; it's more or less a variant spelling of ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN.

I'm going to guess this is part of the "SQL Standard", but I'd like to comment that this seems really ... weird. All languages have their warts or things they could have done better in hind sight, but this strikes me as very weird.

That being said, I can sort of see why you say that. Looking at the examples, I can see:

ALTER TYPE compfoo ADD ATTRIBUTE f3 int;

which looks a lot like adding a column to a table. It would have been nice to know what "compfoo" is as that would have cleared up some confusion. I guess I'll make a doc change request.

Of course, the real answer is that someone here in the past should have made a small table of reference values instead of creating an ENUM, then I wouldn't be facing this. Again, hind sight...sigh.

Thanks,
Kevin
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