Re: PL/PgSQL "bare" function calls

Tom Lane wrote:

>Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com> writes:
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>>(3) The parser must distinguish between two cases when it sees an
>>unknown word (T_WORD) beginning a statement. The word could be the
>>beginning of a SQL statement (stmt_execsql in the grammar), such as:
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>>UPDATE ...;
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>>or the name of a function in a function call:
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>>invoke_func(...);
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>>The patch currently distinguishes between these cases by looking at the
>>next token -- if it is a left parenthesis, the patch assumes it is a
>>function call, otherwise it assumes it is a SQL statement. Is this the
>>best approach?
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>That seems fairly unworkable.  For example
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>    SELECT (2,3,4);
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>is valid SQL.  Also I'm not sure if you can extend this to cope with
>schema-qualified function names.
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ISTM that this is being done at the wrong level anyway. I'd like to see 
a facility available in our SQL, e.g.
 CALL foo();

with the restriction that foo() should be declared to return void. Of 
course, that doesn't remove the keyword requirement as Neil wanted, but 
doing that would probably require a lot more work - we'd have to make 
procedures a whole lot closer to  first-class objects.

cheers

andrew