On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 8:52 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 7:04 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:
>>> I do not like the use of parentheses in the usage description "list
>>> (procedural) languages". Why not have it simply as "list procedural
>>> languages"?
>>
>> Because it lists non-procedural langauges as well? (I didn't check it,
>> that's just a guess)
>
> There are many places in our code and documentation where "procedural
> language" or "language" are treated as synonyms. There's no semantic
> difference; procedural is simply a noise word.
[bikeshedding]
I agree with Andreas' suggestion that the help string be "list
procedural languages", even though the \dLS output looks something
like this:
List of languagesProcedural Language | Owner | Trusted
---------------------+-------+---------c | josh | finternal | josh | fplpgsql
| josh | tsql | josh | t
(4 rows)
which, as Magnus points out, includes non-procedural languages (SQL).
I think that "list languages" could be confusing to newcomers -- the
very people who might be reading through the help output of psql for
the first time -- who might suppose that "languages" has something to
do with the character sets supported by PostgreSQL, and might not even
be aware that a variety of procedural languages can be used inside the
database.
Josh