On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 2:39 PM Andrew Gierth <and...@tao11.riddles.org.uk> wrote: > Or we could kill off postfix operators...
/me helps Andrew hijack the thread. We wouldn't even have to go that far. We could just restrict it to a specific list of operators that are hard-coded into the lexer and parser, like say only '!'. Even if we killed postfix operators completely, the number of users who would be affected would probably be minimal, because the only postfix operator we ship is for factorial, and realistically, that's not exactly a critical thing for most users, especially considering that our implementation is pretty slow. But the number of people using out-of-core postfix operators has got to be really tiny -- unless, maybe, there's some really popular extension like PostGIS that uses them. I think it's pretty clear that the theoretical beauty of being able to handle postfix operators is not worth the tangible cost they impose on our parser. We're losing more users as a result of SQL that other systems can accept and we cannot than we are gaining by being able to support user-defined postfix operators. The latter is not exactly a mainstream need. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company