This seems to be a popular issue when porting from PL/SQL, so I'll throw it out here for discussion. Apparently, in PL/SQL you can call another procedure without the CALL keyword. Here is a patch that attempts to implement that in PL/pgSQL as well. It's not very pretty.
The CALL is not optional in PL/SQL - I was surprised - it is required in some environments, and it should not be used in other (like PL/SQL)
please, fix me, if I am wrong.
SQL/PSM requires it.
I agree, so in this case, the CALL can be optional - because procedures are called by different mechanism than functions - and there is not additional overhead. It is not strictly necessary, because tools like ora2pg has not any problem with procedure identification and some transformations.
But - if we allow optional CALL in PL/pgSQL, then we will have inconsistence between PL/pgSQL and other environments, when the CALL will be required. What is not too nice.
I seem to recall that there were past discussions about this, with respect to the PERFORM command, but I couldn't find them anymore.
Also, I think PL/SQL allows you to call a procedure with no arguments without parentheses. I have not implemented that. I think it could be done, but it's not very appealing.
I don't like this feature. I don't see any benefit. Different case are functions - then users can implement some pseudovariables like CURRENT_USER, ..
If anyone has more details about the PL/SQL side of this, that would be useful. What I could find is that using CALL and not using CALL appear to be equivalent. -- Peter Eisentraut http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
