On 2026-01-13 Tu 12:24 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com> writes:
On Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 7:17 AM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
I don't even know how you could implement 3) realistically. We have zero
infrastructure for making e.g. parser, keyword list etc change due to defines
compile time.
Is that an architecturally unsolvable thing, or is it a simple matter
of programming? Would it be nice to have said infrastructure?
You'd have to throw out flex and bison and build some sort of
extensible parser. That has some attraction to me personally
(I worked on such systems decades ago at HP), but it's fairly
hard to justify the amount of effort that would be needed to
get there. It might well be slower than a flex/bison parser,
and/or have poorer detection of grammar inconsistencies, either
of which would be bad for our usage.
Maybe, but maybe not. ISTR that gcc abandoned use of bison for their C compiler a long time ago, and that gnat's Ada compiler was hand cut from the get go.
SQL is a different kettle of fish, of course - it dwarfs C and Ada in complexity.
Not saying I think this would be a good thing or not. I agree that the effort required would be huge and the benefit might be modest, but it is feasible IMHO.
cheers
andrew
--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com
