Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> * Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
>> You can't have it both ways. Either you throw an error if the name's
>> not there, or you don't.
> I'm not following why we couldn't handle a dropped column differently.
Different from what? A name-based lookup isn't going to find a dropped
column, because its attname has been replaced with
"........pg.dropped.N........"
> Dropped tables don't hang around in the catalog long after they've been
> dropped.
If you are talking about the case where a lookup by attnum finds a dropped
column, that does return null already, cf column_privilege_check().
But I don't see a way for a name-based lookup to do the same without
losing all semblance of error detection.
regards, tom lane