Hi Tom,
understood. If anybody needs a tiny bit of motivation to write that extra bit of code which would complain at compile time: I sense that there are a lot of shops like mine who would love to get off of Oracle due to the cost. That means you'll have guys like myself who are well versed on Oracle's PL/SQL trying to write PL/pgSQL functions. If ROLLBACK; were to cause a syntax error, it would immediately tell guys like myself that we are missing a key concept of how PL/pgSQL works. Saving the error until run time makes look for other reasons that ROLLBACK; might not be working. I know it's a trivial point, but just putting it out there.
Thanks everybody for the enlightening conversation!
Regards,
Mike