Re: massive quotes?

Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > Uh, the problem with long keywords is that you are then requiring the
> > _parser_ to identify those keywords, and at that point, the entire text
> > between the keywords has been sliced up by the lexer, which will
> > certainly make it a mess.  I might be wrong that we can even use more
> > then two characters for the start of quote string
> 
> You're wrong.  We can use anything we like for the start of the quote
> string; flex is quite capable of recognizing fixed strings, and even
> variable ones.  I'd prefer to avoid expecting it to handle
> up/downcasing, I think, but there is no technical reason that the
> delimiter couldn't look like a keyword.
> 
> My objection to the proposal FUNCTIONBODY is that it makes it look like
> the feature is only useful in CREATE FUNCTION.  In point of fact, the
> quoting facility could be used to construct any SQL string literal.  The
> comparison points I am thinking about are shell here-documents and
> Perl quoting conventions, both of which are used for many things.

Sounds good.  I just think keywords in general are weird to use for
quoting.  We use "'" for quoting, so something similar like another
operator combination would be nice.  I have never been fond of the
here-document approach, though I can see the value of doing
here-documents in here-documents, though if we make the open and close
of the quote string different <--, -->, we can still do that, no?

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