On 26/11/13 09:42, AK wrote:
> Kevin,
>
> I do see your logic now, but this thing is a common mistake - it means that
> this seems counter-intuitive to some people. What would happen if we applied
> Occam's razor and just removed this rule?
>
> All existing code would continue to work as is, and we would have one less
> rule to memorize. That would make PostgreSql a slightly better product,
> right?
>
Perhaps not a good use of Mr Occam's razor. Postgres supports many
procedural languages (e.g plperl, plpython) and all these have different
grammar rules from SQL - and from each other. We can't (and shouldn't)
try altering them to be similar to SQL - it would defeat the purpose of
providing a procedural environment where the given language works as
advertised.
So in the case of plpgsql - it needs to follow the Ada grammar,
otherwise it would be useless.
The fact that different languages may have similar or the same keywords
with different grammar and punctuation rules is just a fact or life (I
trip over that often when switching from perl to python in the same day)!
Regards
Mark