Re: psql Feature request \set query

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> writes:

> Josh Berkus wrote:
>> Hackers,
>> 
>> Just had a feature request from Wheeler, and I don't see why it shouldn't 
>> go on our todo list.
>
> I think you're asking for more scriptability in psql.  Personally I
> think that would be a great idea, but we need a lot more than what's
> being proposed here.  We'll also need loops, conditionals, etc.  We've
> had patches for those submitted over the years, but one at a time they
> are easily rejected because they're so obviously incomplete.

FWIW I disagree. I think that's a recipe for ending up with a hacky
turing-complete but awkward-as-hell language.

If you want a language to write arbitrary database driving code with loops,
conditionals, etc then I would recommend going with any of the existing fully
functional languages. You can write your scripts in perl, python, ruby, or
whatever.

If we do it ourselves we'll always have a terrible half-baked language.
Building a whole language with clean syntax and consistent semantics is a lot
of work.

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