Re: Support for N synchronous standby servers - take 2

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 9:29 AM, Masahiko Sawada <sawada.mshk@gmail.com> wrote:
> Also I felt a sense of discomfort regarding using [ and ] as a special
> character for priority method.
> Because (, ) and [, ] are a little similar each other, so it would
> easily make many syntax errors when nested style is supported.
> And the synopsis of that in documentation is odd;
>     synchronous_standby_names = 'N [ node_name [, ...] ]'
>
> This topic has been already discussed before but, we might want to
> change it to other characters such as < and >?

I personally would recommend against <>.  Those should mean less-than
and greater-than, not grouping.  I think you could use parentheses,
().  There's nothing saying that has to mean any particular thing, so
you may as well use it for the first thing implemented, perhaps.  Or
you could use [] or {}.  It *is* important that you don't create
confusing syntax summaries, but I don't think that's a reason to pick
a nonstandard syntax for grouping.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company