Re: Adding a Column documentation is misleading - Mailing list pgsql-docs

From Alvaro Herrera
Subject Re: Adding a Column documentation is misleading
Date
Msg-id 20191106131330.GA8130@alvherre.pgsql
Whole thread Raw
In response to Adding a Column documentation is misleading  (PG Doc comments form <noreply@postgresql.org>)
Responses Re: Adding a Column documentation is misleading  (Gavin Flower <GavinFlower@archidevsys.co.nz>)
List pgsql-docs
On 2019-Nov-06, PG Doc comments form wrote:

> Page: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/ddl-alter.html
> Description:
> 
> In 5.6.1. Adding a Column, there is a kind of example 'ALTER TABLE products
> ADD COLUMN description text;'
> 
> The words 'description' and 'text' are misleading -- as according to the
> formal documentation of the SQL command
> (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/sql-altertable.html), they should be
> 'column_name' and 'data_type'.

Well, it's an example, so "description" is the column name and "text" is
its data type.  If you had a table called products, you could run that
command and it would work just fine (assuming you don't already have a
column called description, doh).

Maybe the example could be made clearer by using some other column name
and some other data type, so that they don't resemble english prose or
keywords.  Maybe "alter table cities add column year_founded integer".
Do you want to propose something better than that?

> A similar problem exists for removing a column, and other actions.

Let's hear your proposed changes.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services



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