On Jul 16, 2010, at 11:02 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> * Robert Haas (robertmhaas@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
syntaxis not cleanly extensible. We have S and + as postfix modifiers, and that's fairly comprehensible, but as soon
asyou 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
commandsto list casts, conversions, and comments, respectively? What syntax would you propose for a backslash command
tolist 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
doyou think can do it at all?
I think "LIST COMMENTS ON SYSTEM AGGREGATES" would be an epic step forward in usability.
...Robert