Ken Johanson wrote:
Interesting thread(s)!
What I didn't see discussed was the possibility of making a server
and/or session option, where we could elect to turn-off the old behavior
(PG specific behavior) and enable the standard/shorthand syntax. Users
need a migration path.
I personally cant ever see using those PGisms/features and would choose
to enable the standard mode. I think I'd have fewer compatibility problems.
Ken
What was discussed is that the AS keyword is required because of the way
the interpreter parses the commands.
With the example given, how does it know that 1::character varying isn't
casting to a character field with an alias of varying or a character
varying field with no alias?
If there was simply a switch to turn the requirement on or off that's
not going to stop things from breaking - the postfix operators still
need to be picked up somehow, it's a technical limitation rather than a
"let's just be difficult and be incompatible with other dbms's" limitation
I think it would be nice as well, I had to migrate a system that didn't
bother putting AS in any of it's views/stored procedures etc and went
through this pain - but I think having to change everything was worth it
to make sure all my scripts were correctly written and free from
possible misinterpretation.
My thoughts anyway.
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