Re: json api WIP patch - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 11:38 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 11:10 AM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
>> On 02/04/2013 10:47 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> The SQL standards considerations seem worth thinking about, too.
>>> We've certainly gone through a lot of pain working toward eliminating
>>> => as an operator name, and if the SQL standard has commandeered ->
>>> for some purpose or other, I'd really rather not add to the headaches
>>> involved should we ever decide to reclaim it.
>>
>> OK, but I'd like to know what is going to be safe. There's no way to
>> future-proof the language. I'm quite prepared to replace -> with something
>> else, and if I do then ->> will need to be adjusted accordingly, I think.
>>
>> My suggestion would be ~> and ~>>. I know David Wheeler didn't like that on
>> the ground that some fonts elevate ~ rather than aligning it in the middle
>> as most monospaced fonts do, but I'm tempted just to say "then use a
>> different font." Other possibilities that come to mind are +> and +>>,
>> although I think they're less attractive. But I'll be guided by the
>> consensus, assuming there is one ;-)
>
> I suspect both of those are pretty safe from an SQL standards point of
> view.  Of course, as Tom is often wont to point out, the SQL standards
> committee sometimes does bizarre things, so nothing's perfect, but I'd
> be rather shocked if any of those got tapped to mean something else.
>
> That having been said, I still don't see value in adding operators at
> all.  Good old function call notation seems perfectly adequate from
> where I sit.  Sure, it's a little more verbose, but when you try to
> too hard make things concise then you end up having to explain to your
> users why \ditS is a sensible thing for them to type into psql, or why
> s@\W@sprintf"%%%02x",ord($&)@e in Perl.  I recognize that I may lose
> this argument, but I've worked with a couple of languages where
> operators can be overloaded (C++) or defined (ML) and it's just never
> seemed to work out very well.  YMMV, of course.

I also basically feel this way, although I know I tend more towards
notational brutalism than many.  I think we shouldn't kid ourselves
that non-default operators will be used, and for
current-implementation reasons (that maybe could be fixed by someone
determined) it's not really at the pleasure of the author to use them
via CREATE OPERATOR either.

So, I basically subscribe to view that we should investigate what
total reliance on prefix syntax looks like.  I guess it'll make nested
navigation horribly ugly, though...positively lisp-esque.  That' s one
consideration hstore doesn't have that may make use of infix notations
considerably more useful for json than hstore.

--
fdr