Fabien COELHO said: > > > So on the point that the standard must be supported, I perfectly agree. > > On the point that anything else should be dropped out: let's do it! > I'll send a patch to remove all those non portable features in > postgresql that make users write non portable code... But I'm not sure > it will be accepted;-) > > Moreover, having == as a synonym for = is not necessarily in > contradiction with a stable, reliable and predictable server.
Nobody is suggesting that we should not support legacy features that are non-standard, nor even that we should not occasionally, and for very good reasons, introduce new non-standard features (e.g. dollar quoting). But making == a synonym for = is just syntactic sugar, of no obvious practical benefit that I can see. I think its alleged utility in teaching C/Java/perl programmers is overstated - if they think of == as equality will they also think of = as assignment? And the fact that C (stupidly) uses = for assignment is the whole reason for the existence of == in the first place, and many languages (e.g. see the algol family) do not suffer from this defect. The last reason I advance against this is that operator space is scarce, and if we do use == somewhere it should be to some better purpose than this. cheers andrew ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
