Andreas Pflug wrote:
>
> I never agreed that a client solution would be satisfying. While
> frontends might try to hide some uglyness of the syntax to the user
> for single functions, editing large scripts with many functions is
> still suffering from "massive quotes".
>
Yes, I agree that a psql-specific solution is not ideal, quite aside
from the problem of making it look nice. It would be better than
nothing, though.
Something that is done at the language level will be portable across
frontends, while something psql-specific will not. Also, pg_dump -s will
kindly restore all the quotes for you, so if you ever edit its output
(as I do sometimes) you'll have to convert stuff all over again,
although I guess pg_dump could be taught to re-unescape things. But then
that seems almost as much trouble as teaching the backend a bit of new
syntax.
For those reasons as well as the aesthetic ones I'd prefer a solution at
the language level.
cheers
andrew