Re: final patch - plpgsql: for-in-array

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 10:33 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> Right, that was my impression, too.  But, I think this may be partly a
>> case of people talking past each other.  My impression of this
>> conversation was a repetition of this sequence:
>
>> A: This syntax is bad.
>> B: But it's way faster!
>
>> ...which makes no sense.  However, what I now think is going on here
>> is that there are really two separate things that are wished for here
>> - a more compact syntax, and a performance improvement.  And taken
>> separately, I agree with both of those desires.  PL/pgsql is an
>> incredibly clunky language syntactically, and it's also slow.  A patch
>> that improves either one of those things has value, whether or not it
>> also does the other one.
>
> I understand the desire for nicer syntax, in the abstract.  I'm just
> unimpressed by this particular change, mainly because I'm afraid that
> it will make syntax-error behaviors worse and foreclose future options
> for other changes to FOR.  If it were necessary to change the syntax
> to get the performance benefit, I might think that on balance we should
> do so; but it isn't.

It'd be nicer syntax if there were some way to have the keyword not
adjacent to the arbitrary expression.

--
Robert Haas
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