Re: pl/pgsql feature request: shorthand for argument and local variable references

I thought about it - but I don't think so this syntax is correct - in your case it should be

  lnm.* ALIAS FOR ALL very_long_name.*;

but it looks a little bit scary in ADA based language.

Maybe

DECLARE lnm LABEL ALIAS FOR very_long_name;

or

DECLARE lnm ALIAS FOR LABEL very_long_name;

I think so implementation should not be hard. But there are advantages, disadvantages - 1. label aliasing increases the complexity of variable searching (instead comparing string with name of namespace, you should compare list of names). Probably not too much. 2. The syntax is a little bit harder than #option. Implementation based on #option can just rename top namespace, so there is not any overhead, and parsing #option syntax is pretty simple (and the syntax is shorter). So from implementation reasons I prefer #option based syntax. There is clear zero impact on performance.

Regards

Pavel