On 07/17/2010 04:02 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
On Jul 16, 2010, at 11:02 PM, Stephen Frost<sfr...@snowman.net> wrote:
* Robert Haas (robertmh...@gmail.com) wrote:
Why must the backslash commands be more powerful than any alternative
we might come up with?
Because they encode alot of information in a character- something which
is next to impossible to do in "english".
I don't think that "terse" and "powerful" are the same thing. One of my beefs
with the backslash commands is that the syntax is not cleanly extensible. We have S and + as
postfix modifiers, and that's fairly comprehensible, but as soon as you think about going much
further with it, it starts to seem like alphabet soup.
In fact, we're pretty close to alphabet soup already. Without looking at the
help, what does \db do? What are the commands to list casts, conversions, and
comments, respectively? What syntax would you propose for a backslash command
to list comments, but only those on a certain object type? If you don't think
we should have a backslash command for that, can you write an SQL query that
lists comments on built-in aggregates in less than two minutes? How many
people do you think can do it at all?
I think "LIST COMMENTS ON SYSTEM AGGREGATES" would be an epic step forward in
usability.
uh oh - that actually sounds like a big step backwards to me - it's
inventing extremely verbose pseudo english syntax for something that we
currently do with a trivial and easy to remember backslash command.
Do we really need to invent a completely new language for this?
Once you extend that syntax to what you are proposing (ie provide a way
to filter like "LIST COMMENTS ON SYSTEM AGGREGATES WITH NUMERIC INPUT")
you basically reinvented a query language - ever heard of SQL or QUEL?
I'm not sure where to draw the line but implementing a proper shortcut
interface for cammands is something taht should be done on the client
side because not every client is the same and the needs of psql might be
radically different from any other client (like pgadmin or a fancy Web
2.0 AJAX thingy - those will likely always use custom catalog queries).
Maybe a differnet way to look at the whole thing is to reconsider our
own catalogs (anyone remember newsysview?) and add a bunch of views to
abstract away most of the current complexity for these usecases?
Stefan
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