On Wed, Sep 2, 2020 at 7:35 AM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
Hi,
on a regular basis I remember a builtin function's name, or can figure it out using \df etc, but can't remember the argument order. A typical example is regexp_*, where I never remember whether the pattern or the input string comes first.
Unfortunatly \df does not really help with that:
=# \df regexp_split_to_table ┌────────────┬───────────────────────┬──────────────────┬─────────────────────┬──────┐ │ Schema │ Name │ Result data type │ Argument data types │ Type │ ├────────────┼───────────────────────┼──────────────────┼─────────────────────┼──────┤ │ pg_catalog │ regexp_split_to_table │ SETOF text │ text, text │ func │ │ pg_catalog │ regexp_split_to_table │ SETOF text │ text, text, text │ func │ └────────────┴───────────────────────┴──────────────────┴─────────────────────┴──────┘
If the parameters were named however, it'd be clear:
=# CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION pg_catalog.regexp_split_to_table(string text, pattern text) RETURNS SETOF text LANGUAGE internal IMMUTABLE PARALLEL SAFE STRICT AS $function$regexp_split_to_table_no_flags$function$
=# \df regexp_split_to_table ┌────────────┬───────────────────────┬──────────────────┬──────────────────────────┬──────┐ │ Schema │ Name │ Result data type │ Argument data types │ Type │ ├────────────┼───────────────────────┼──────────────────┼──────────────────────────┼──────┤ │ pg_catalog │ regexp_split_to_table │ SETOF text │ string text, pattern text │ func │ │ pg_catalog │ regexp_split_to_table │ SETOF text │ text, text, text │ func │ └────────────┴───────────────────────┴──────────────────┴──────────────────────────┴──────┘
(I intentionally left the three parameter version unchanged, to show the difference)
In the docs we already name the parameters using SQL like syntax, see [1]. How about we actually do so for at least the more common / complicated functions?
+many
I find myself in the same situation a lot.
I've never realized that's an implementation detail and not something fundamental preventing the parameters from being named in the built-in functions.
