* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> > * Alvaro Herrera (alvherre@2ndquadrant.com) wrote:
> >> Can't you keep those words as Sconst or something (DefElems?) until the
> >> execution phase, so that they don't need to be keywords at all?
>
> > Seems like we could do that, though I'm not convinced that it really
> > gains us all that much. These are only unreserved keywords, of course,
> > so they don't impact users the way reserved keywords (of any kind) can.
> > While there may be some places where we use a string to represent a set
> > of defined options, I don't believe that's typical
>
> -1 for having to write them as string literals; but I think what Alvaro
> really means is to arrange for the words to just be identifiers in the
> grammar, which you strcmp against at execution. See for example
> reloption_list. (Whether you use DefElem as the internal representation
> is a minor detail, though it might help for making the parsetree
> copyObject-friendly.)
I saw the various list-based cases and commented in my reply (the one you
quote part of above) why those didn't seem to make sense for this case
(it's not a list and I don't see it ever growing into one).
> vacuum_option_elem shows another way to avoid making a word into a
> keyword, although to me that one is more of an antipattern; it'd be better
> to leave the strcmp to execution, since there's so much other code that
> does things that way.
Both of those cases are for lists, which this is not. I certainly
understand that it makes sense to allow a list of options to be passed
in any order and that means we need to build just the list with the
grammar and then check what's in the list at execution time, and further
check that the user didn't provide a set of invalid or duplicative
options, but this isn't a list. If the thinking is that it *should* be
a list, then it'd be really helpful to see an example or two of what the
list-based syntax would be. I provided one in my reply and commented on
why it didn't seem like a good approach.
Thanks!
Stephen