Why we don't introduce a temporary functions instead?
I think that'd be a lot cleaner and simpler. It's something I've frequently wanted, and as Hekki points out it's already possible by creating the function in pg_temp, there just isn't the syntax sugar for "CREATE TEMPORARY FUNCTION".
So why not just add "CREATE TEMPORARY FUNCTION"?
Sure, why not.
It means two steps:
CREATE TEMPORARY FUNCTION ... $$ $$;
SELECT my_temp_function(blah);
but I'm not personally convinced that a parameterised DO block is much easier, and the idea just rings wrong to me.
With the above, you'll have to remember to drop the function when you're done, or deal with the fact that the function might already exist. That's doable, of course, but with a DO statement you don't have to.
I agree with Pavel that the natural way to parameterise DO blocks, down the track, will be to allow them to get (and set?) SQL-typed session variables. Of course, we'd need to support them first ;-)
I responded to Pavel that using a session variable for a return value would be awkward, but using them as parameters would open a different can of worms. A session variable might change while the statement is run, so for anything but trivial DO blocks, a best practice would have to be to copy the session variable to a local variable as the first thing to do. For example, if you just use session variables arg1 and arg2, and you call a function that uses those same session variables for some other purposes, you will be surprised. Also, you'd have to remember to reset the session variables after use if there's any sensitive information in them, or you might leak them to surprising places. And if you forget to pass an argument, i.e. you forget to set a session variable that's used as an argument, the parser would not help you to catch your mistake but would merrily run the DO block with whatever the content of the argument happens to be.
Personally I can't to imagine some more complex code as DO block.
Using session variables for arguments would be anything but natural.
