On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 8:58 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> On Mar 25, 2011, at 7:45 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: >>> Well, maybe, but it's not like it's subtle or hard to fix. > >> Depends how much of it you have. I've become very skeptical of >> anything that breaks pg_dump-and-reload-ability. > > This wouldn't break pg_dump scripts, because they disable > check_function_bodies. You would get a failure on first *use* > of a function, which is something different. > > Basically my concern here is that in the name of easing a short-term > conversion issue, we'll be condemning users to a future of subtle, > hard-to-find bugs due to ambiguous names. How many hundreds of > reports have we seen about the equivalent problem in plpgsql? > > You could argue that the frequency of plpgsql issues was at least partly > due to having a poor choice of which way to resolve the ambiguity, but > I don't think it can be entirely blamed on that.
As I've said before, I believe that the root cause of this problem is that using the same syntax for variables and column names is a bad idea in the first place. If we used $foo or ?foo or ${foo} or $.foo or &&foo!!$#? to mean "the parameter called foo", then this would all be a non-issue. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers