Hello Peter,
whereas the current standard says
SUBSTRING(text SIMILAR pattern ESCAPE escapechar)
The former was in SQL99, but the latter has been there since SQL:2003.
It's pretty easy to implement the second form also, so here is a patch that
does that.
Patches apply cleanly, compile and "make check" is ok. doc gen is ok as
well.
Grammar cleanup is a definite improvement as it makes the grammar closer
to the actual syntax.
I cannot say I'm a fan of this kind of keywords added for some arguments.
I guess that it allows distinguishing between variants. I do not have the
standard at hand: I wanted to check whether these keywords could be
reordered, i.e. whether SUBSTRING(text ESCAPE ec SIMILAR part) was legal.
I guess not.
Maybe the doc could advertise more systematically whether a features
conforms fully or partially to some SQL standards, or is pg specific. The
added documentation refers both to SQL:1999 and SQL99. I'd suggest to
chose one, possibly the former, and use it everywhere consistently.
It seems that two instances where not updated to the new syntax, see in
./src/backend/catalog/information_schema.sql and
./contrib/citext/sql/citext.sql.
--
Fabien.
