Neil Conway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The historical origins of the feature are no excuse for its > deficiencies.
On the other hand, the alleged deficiencies are not bad enough to justify making non-backwards-compatible changes. If we were getting routine complaints from the field I might be willing to break things in order to address the issue. But we're not --- AFAIR you are the first to raise the point at all. > On second thought, there's another alternative. Rather than improving > \set, we could invent a new mechanism for setting psql-internal > variables, and leave the \set stuff to user-defined variables. I was toying with the idea of inventing a "\declare foo" command (which would error out if the variable foo already exists), along with an optional setting that makes psql complain about either use of or assignment to an undeclared variable. As long as latter setting is false the behavior is backwards-compatible. By setting it true you get the sort of error checking you're after. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster