On Fri, Aug 28, 2026 at 1:11 PM Tom Lane <[email protected]> wrote: > > Masahiko Sawada <[email protected]> writes: > > While reviewing a patch for the WAIT FOR command I noticed that its > > command tag is "WAIT" rather than "WAIT FOR". I could not find this > > discussed in the main thread, although I have not read all of them, so > > I might miss something. I want to confirm it because a command tag is > > not something we can revisit later when we release v19.0. > > I think it's fine. The FOR is a noise word that's useful only to > make the command's grammar vaguely resemble English. For precedent, > consider INSERT, which must have INTO but that's not part of the > command tag.
Good point. A difference between INSERT and WAIT is that the doc uses "WAIT FOR" as its command name instead of "WAIT" whereas it uses "INSERT" for INSERT statements: % git grep -e "<command>WAIT.*</command>" doc/src/sgml/ref/wait_for.sgml: <command>WAIT FOR</command> must be executed as a top-level command. doc/src/sgml/ref/wait_for.sgml: <command>WAIT FOR</command> waits until the specified doc/src/sgml/ref/wait_for.sgml: <command>WAIT FOR</command> compares only the numeric doc/src/sgml/ref/wait_for.sgml: <command>WAIT FOR</command> will return <literal>success</literal> doc/src/sgml/ref/wait_for.sgml: On a standby server, <command>WAIT FOR</command> sessions may be doc/src/sgml/ref/wait_for.sgml: doing. Applications using <command>WAIT FOR</command> on a standby doc/src/sgml/ref/wait_for.sgml: You can use <command>WAIT FOR</command> command to wait for doc/src/sgml/ref/wait_for.sgml: Then an application could run <command>WAIT FOR</command> doc/src/sgml/ref/wait_for.sgml: The same example uses <command>WAIT FOR</command> with doc/src/sgml/release-19.sgml: A new <link linkend="sql-wait-for"><command>WAIT FOR</command></link> doc/src/sgml/release-19.sgml:Add <link linkend="sql-wait-for"><command>WAIT FOR</command></link> command to allow standbys to wait for <link linkend="wal-internals"><acronym>LSN</acronym></link> values to be written, flushed, or replayed (Kartyshov Ivan, Alexander Korotkov, Xuneng Zhou) > > > Strictly the same rule would argue for > > "WAIT FOR LSN", but "WAIT FOR" is the name the manual gives the > > command, and it leaves room if other things become waitable in the > > future. > > If anything, I'd change the manual. "WAIT FOR" is neither short > nor a useful description of what's being waited for. Either "WAIT" > or "WAIT FOR LSN" would be more plausible as a page heading. Agreed. Regards, -- Masahiko Sawada Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com
