Hello Robert,
>> Your experience as an seasoned core developer and a committer is
>> probably different:-)
>
> Well, everybody can have their own opinion on what is reasonable.
Sure.
> There are times I argue for making a patch smaller (frequent) and
> times when I argue for making it bigger (rare).
Yep.
> We had pretty much this exact same argument about the pgbench lexer and
> parser and in the event I coded something up in less than a day. This
> argument feels like a rerun of that one.
There are some differences: pgbench already had one operator at a time
expressions, while psql has survived till today with none, which suggest a
less pressing need.
Moreover the features are partly orthogonal and would touch psql
significantly in different although probably overlapping areas: - expressions is rather about \set, even if reused with
\ifas well - condition is about \if ... \endif and ignoring some input lines
The current expression evaluation in pgbench is about 1000 lines for
scanning, parsing & evaluating, and does not yet support boolean
expressions, although a patch for that has been in the queue for some
time. I foresee that someone will suggest/require/demand... that the
expression code be shared between pgbench and psql, which is another
argument for dissociating these two features (expression and conditional
in psql) from the start.
--
Fabien.