On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 7:44 AM, Marko Tiikkaja <marko@joh.to> wrote: > On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 2:26 PM, Peter Eisentraut > <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: >> >> It's not like PL/pgSQL is the king of brevity. > > > This is essentially saying "PL/PgSQL isn't perfect, so we shouldn't try and > make it better". I hear this argument a lot, and as long as people keep > rejecting improvements for this reason they can keep saying it. It's a > self-fulfilling prophecy.
Agreed. But adding language features, especially syntactical ones, demands prudence; there is good reason to limit keywords like that. What about:
pgsql.rows pgsql.found pgsql.sqlerrm etc as automatic variables (I think this was suggested upthread). Conflicts with existing structures is of course an issue but I bet it could be worked out.
Any implicit namespace can be problem. But we can continue in default unlabeled namespace for auto variables with possibility to specify this namespace explicitly.