Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> Right, that was my impression, too. But, I think this may be partly a
> case of people talking past each other. My impression of this
> conversation was a repetition of this sequence:
> A: This syntax is bad.
> B: But it's way faster!
> ...which makes no sense. However, what I now think is going on here
> is that there are really two separate things that are wished for here
> - a more compact syntax, and a performance improvement. And taken
> separately, I agree with both of those desires. PL/pgsql is an
> incredibly clunky language syntactically, and it's also slow. A patch
> that improves either one of those things has value, whether or not it
> also does the other one.
I understand the desire for nicer syntax, in the abstract. I'm just
unimpressed by this particular change, mainly because I'm afraid that
it will make syntax-error behaviors worse and foreclose future options
for other changes to FOR. If it were necessary to change the syntax
to get the performance benefit, I might think that on balance we should
do so; but it isn't.
regards, tom lane