Re: Requests for Development - Mailing list pgsql-sql

Josh Berkus wrote:
> Tom, Bruce, Jan, etc.:
>
> [...]
>
> The rest of these requests apply to 7.2:
>
> 2. Stored Procedure functionality, i.e. outputting a full recordset from
> a function (or new structure, if functions are hard to adapt) based on
> the last SELECT statement passed to the function.  An alternative would
> be to develop parameterized views, which might be the easiest path.
   That's one of my favorite requests, and I'd be glad to have a   chance to start on it. Unfortunately the basic
supportin the   parser  and  other  parts of the core engine isn't completely   planned yet, otherwise PL/pgSQL and
PL/Tclwould've had  this   from the very beginning.
 

> 3. Slightly more informative syntax error messages - frankly, just
> grabbing a little more text around the word or punctuation that
> triggered the error would be enormously helpful (I can't tell you the
> number of times I've gotten "Error at or near ')'" in a huge DDL
> statement.
   That's  a  general  problem  of a lex/yacc parser and I'm not   sure how to force it to be a little more
explanative. Maybe   we have a chance to grab something from the lex input buffer,   but IIRC that's unsafe because
nobodyknows how much of  that   is already eaten into yacc tokens.
 

> 4. Use of named in addition to ordinal variables in PL/PGSQL functions
> (e.g. $account_type, $period instead of $1, $2).
   Another  general  problem  in the core engine. Dunno if we'll   have named arguments in the near  future.  In  the
meantime,  PL/pgSQL  functions  can  use  ALIAS  to define the names for   arguments at the very top (it's a precompile
timeonly thing,   so  there  is  little  to no performance impact).  And PL/Tcl   functions could easily do a "set
account_type$1" as well, so   I  don't  see  a  real  problem  for  the  readability of the   functions body.
 
   To put the ball back into your  yard,  I'd  like  to  make  a   request  too.   There  seem  to be alot people using
PL/pgSQL  and/or PL/Tcl extensively.  OTOH there are newbies again  and   again asking for a good tutorial, programming
examplesand so   on. Writing a good tutorial doesn't require  a  good  backend   developer,  IMHO  an  experienced
SQL-programmerwould be the   better guy anyway. During the past 4 years  I've  heard  over   and  over that people
wouldlike to contribute their $0.05 if   they only could code in C. That's an area where nobody  needs   any C
experience.


Jan

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