I've been struggling with this issue for most of my professional life. Going into the internal demo version of what eventually became PDP-11 Datatrieve, I required semi-colons as terminators. My technical writer told me that that sucked, I was free to leave it that way, but the documentation was going to say that semi-colons were optional. I had to admit, grudgingly, that she had a point.
The Datatrieves (and QLI) parsed (without generating a syntax tree) input lines looking for complete statements, otherwise changed to a continuation prompt for more input. Everyone seemed happy with that. ISQL was more or less a development testbed for dynamic SQL. I never expected anyone to use it for anything significant, so I didn't bother putting in command completion recognition. If I had been more prescient, I would have have. In the NuoDB command line interaction tool I made command completion recognition settable, which I think is about right. Switching terminators is nightmare, though the scripts in the test system used them. Ugh. AmorphousDB, at least at this point, has command completion recognition only. I made things easy with a clean and simple parser that understands command scanning. My experience is that for human interaction, recognition of complete statements is absolutely necessary. A crud hack like using a trailing semi-colon to indicate command completion just doesn't cut it. Scripting tools, likewise. An API, however, needs to be more rigorous. The parsing cost is a red herring. The half dozen microseconds to check for command completion isn't worth worrying about. On 10/15/2015 11:34 AM, Ann Harrison wrote: >> On Oct 15, 2015, at 9:59 AM, Dimitry Sibiryakov <s...@ibphoenix.com> wrote: >> >> 15.10.2015 15:51, marius adrian popa wrote: >>> In InterBase 7 is changed so procedure and trigger programming language to >>> no longer >>> require the use of SET TERM >> IMHO, this is unnecessary complication of isql's parser. I'd prefer to >> follow KISS concept. > Respectfully disagree. Yes, it complicates isql, but it makes the user's > life easier. One bit of complication in isql, thousands of simpler to > create triggers and procedures. > > Cheers, > > Ann > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel
