On 6/22/2005 1:29 AM, Neil Conway wrote:
Tom Lane wrote:
The long-term point in my mind is that removing syntactical
redundancy always reduces the ability to detect errors or report
errors acccurately
Lexical scoping is unambiguous in a language like PL/PgSQL. Since it is
simple to determine whether a given END matches an IF, LOOP, or BEGIN, I
don't see how it would reduce our "ability to detect errors or report
errors accurately".
Consider for example the possibility that Oracle's next release adds
some new frammish that can't be duplicated because we chose not to
distinguish various forms of "END xxx" ...
As lexical scoping is still unambiguous, we could actually add a K_LOOP
/ K_IF token to the input stream, if that would make you happier :) (Of
course I'm not suggesting this -- the point is that as far as the parser
is concerned, we should have precisely the same information for
disambiguating the input as we used to have.)
BTW, I notice that Oracle actually allows:
<<label>>
LOOP
-- ...
END LOOP label;
But what if they decide to allow
LOOP
-- ...
IF condition THEN
EXIT;
END LOOP;
at some point? There you'd get ambiguity.
Jan
whereas we don't allow the optional label following END LOOP. Which goes
to my general point: this frammish has existed in PL/SQL for a while,
but it's not as if people are clamoring for us to implement it. I would
wager that most people care about having *equivalent* features to
PL/SQL, not exactly identical syntax. For example, the lack of
autonomous transactions is something people have asked for in the past,
because it *does* make porting PL/SQL applications more difficult. I
can't see anyone losing any sleep because we are slightly more relaxed
about the input we accept.
-Neil
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