Hello Tom,

On 2020-11-18 16:49, Tom Lane wrote:
Tels <nospam-pg-ab...@bloodgate.com> writes:
On 2020-11-18 06:06, Michael Paquier wrote:
On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 10:14:10PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
Agreed, I'm not trying to block this patch.  Just wishing
there were a better way.

To me the code looks like a prime candidate for "data-driven"
refactoring.
It should be redone as generic code that reads a table of rules with
params and then checks and applies each. Thus the repetitive code would
be replaced by a bit more generic code and a lot of code-free data.

In the past I've looked into whether the rules could be autogenerated
from the backend's grammar.  It did not look very promising though.
The grammar isn't really factorized appropriately -- for instance,
tab-complete has a lot of knowledge about which kinds of objects can
be named in particular places, while the Bison productions only know
that's a "name".  Still, the precedent of ECPG suggests it might be
possible to process the grammar rules somehow to get to a useful
result.

Hm, that would be even better, for now I was just thinking that
code like this:

    IF RULE_A_MATCHES THEN
    DO STUFF A
    ELSE IF RULE_B_MATCHES THEN
    DO_STUFF_B
    ELSE IF RULE_C_MATCHES THEN
    DO_STUFF_C
    ...

should be replaced by

    RULE_A MATCH STUFF
    RULE_B MATCH STUFF
    RULE_C MATCH STUFF
    ...

    FOREACH RULE DO
      IF RULE.MATCH THEN
        DO RULE.STUFF
    END FOREACH

Even if the rules would be manually created (converted from the current
code), that would be more compact and probably less error-prone.

Creating the rule automatically turns this into a completely different
story.

--
Best regards,

Tels


Reply via email to