Re: massive quotes?

Bruce Momjian wrote:

>Tom Lane wrote:
>  
>
>>The discussion so far today seems to be entirely a rehash of arguments
>>already made (and in many cases already rebutted).  Rather than wasting
>>list bandwidth with this, I think each camp ought to go off and do their
>>homework.  Give us *details* of how your solution would work.
>>    
>>
>
>Another idea would be to enable another set of quoting characters, like:
>
>    CREATE FUNCTION xx ...
>    <--
>        x = 'fred';
>        ...
>    -->
>
>and have the lexer understand those new quoting characters.  We just use
>'' too much in function bodies to use that also for quoting the function
>text.  Of course, '<--' would have no special meaning inside a quoted
>string, so we are only eliminating their use as custom operators, and I
>think that is reasonable.
>
>Having heard all the other proposals, I think this will be the clearest.
>
>  
>
This looks quite similar to my proposal. I called it "function body is 
enclosed in keywords", while Bruce will enclose it in new quote strings. 
This is obviously very different for the lexer/parser, while identical 
for the user. Sounds good to me.
The quoting strings seem a bit suspicious to me, I can imagine comments 
like this "converting abc --> def", which would certainly break the 
function definition (I scanned a part of my sources, I found two 
occurrences of "-->", one of them in SQL code...)

How about quoting strings that look like keywords, e.g. FUNCTIONBODY and 
ENDFUNCTIONBODY?

CREATE FUNCTION foo() RETURNS int4 AS
FUNCTIONBODY
DECLARE bar int4;
BEGIN  RETURN bar;
END;
ENDFUNCTIONBODY
LANGUAGE 'plpgsql';

Regards,
Andreas


Regards,
Andreas