While the SQL standard is pretty vague on the overall topic of operator
precedence (because it never presents a unified BNF for all expressions),
it does seem reasonable to conclude from the spec for <boolean value
expression> that OR has the lowest precedence, then AND, then NOT, then IS
tests, then the six standard comparison operators, then everything else
(since any non-boolean operator in a WHERE clause would need to be an
argument of one of these).
We were only sort of on board with that: most notably, while "<" ">" and
"=" had properly low precedence, "<=" ">=" and "<>" were treated as generic
operators and so had significantly higher precedence. And "IS" tests were
even higher precedence than those, which is very clearly wrong per spec.
Another problem was that "foo NOT SOMETHING bar" constructs, such as
"x NOT LIKE y", were treated inconsistently because of a bison
implementation artifact: they had the documented precedence with respect
to operators to their right, but behaved like NOT (i.e., very low priority)
with respect to operators to their left.
Fixing the precedence issues is just a small matter of rearranging the
precedence declarations in gram.y, except for the NOT problem, which
requires adding an additional lookahead case in base_yylex() so that we
can attach a different token precedence to NOT LIKE and allied two-word
operators.
The bulk of this patch is not the bug fix per se, but adding logic to
parse_expr.c to allow giving warnings if an expression has changed meaning
because of these precedence changes. These warnings are off by default
and are enabled by the new GUC operator_precedence_warning. It's believed
that very few applications will be affected by these changes, but it was
agreed that a warning mechanism is essential to help debug any that are.
There are a couple of places in our grammar that fail to be strict LALR(1),
by requiring more than a single token of lookahead to decide what to do.
Up to now we've dealt with that by using a filter between the lexer and
parser that merges adjacent tokens into one in the places where two tokens
of lookahead are necessary. But that creates a number of user-visible
anomalies, for instance that you can't name a CTE "ordinality" because
"WITH ordinality AS ..." triggers folding of WITH and ORDINALITY into one
token. I realized that there's a better way.
In this patch, we still do the lookahead basically as before, but we never
merge the second token into the first; we replace just the first token by
a special lookahead symbol when one of the lookahead pairs is seen.
This requires a couple extra productions in the grammar, but it involves
fewer special tokens, so that the grammar tables come out a bit smaller
than before. The filter logic is no slower than before, perhaps a bit
faster.
I also fixed the filter logic so that when backing up after a lookahead,
the current token's terminator is correctly restored; this eliminates some
weird behavior in error message issuance, as is shown by the one change in
existing regression test outputs.
I believe that this patch entirely eliminates odd behaviors caused by
lookahead for WITH. It doesn't really improve the situation for NULLS
followed by FIRST/LAST unfortunately: those sequences still act like a
reserved word, even though there are cases where they should be seen as two
ordinary identifiers, eg "SELECT nulls first FROM ...". I experimented
with additional grammar hacks but couldn't find any simple solution for
that. Still, this is better than before, and it seems much more likely
that we *could* somehow solve the NULLS case on the basis of this filter
behavior than the previous one.
of different parsers having different YYSTYPE unions that they want to use
with it. I defined a new union core_YYSTYPE that is just the (very short)
list of semantic values returned by the core scanner. I had originally
worried that this would require an extra interface layer, but actually we can
have parser.c's base_yylex (formerly filtered_base_yylex) take care of that at
no extra cost. Names associated with the core scanner are now "core_yy_foo",
with "base_yy_foo" being used in the core Bison parser and the parser.c
interface layer.
This solves the last serious stumbling block to eliminating plpgsql's separate
lexer. One restriction that will still be present is that plpgsql and the
core will have to agree on the token numbers assigned to tokens that can be
returned by the core lexer. Since Bison doesn't seem willing to accept
external assignments of those numbers, we'll have to live with decreeing that
core and plpgsql grammars declare these tokens first and in the same order.
Changes:
Pass in the keyword lookup array instead of having it be hardwired.
(This incidentally allows elimination of some duplicate coding in ecpg.)
Re-order the token declarations in gram.y so that non-keyword tokens have
numbers that won't change when keywords are added or removed.
Add ".." and ":=" to the set of tokens recognized by scan.l. (Since these
combinations are nowhere legal in core SQL, this does not change anything
except the precise wording of the error you get when you write this.)
of features added to flex and bison since this code was originally written.
This change doesn't in itself offer any new capability, but it's needed
infrastructure for planned improvements in plpgsql.
Another feature now available in flex is the ability to make it use palloc
instead of malloc, so do that to avoid possible memory leaks. (We should
at some point change the other lexers likewise, but this commit doesn't
touch them.)
distinction between the external API (parser.h) and declarations that only
need to be visible within the raw parser code (gramparse.h, which now is only
included by parser.c, gram.y, scan.l, and keywords.c). This is in preparation
for the upcoming change to a reentrant lexer, which will require referencing
YYSTYPE in the declarations of base_yylex and filtered_base_yylex, hence
gram.h will have to be included by gramparse.h. We don't want any more files
than absolutely necessary to depend on gram.h, so some cleanup is called for.
fact that this is breaking the MSVC build, it's probably not really a good
idea to expand the dependencies of gram.h any further than the core parser;
for instance the value of SCONST might depend on which bison version you'd
built with. Better to expose an additional call point in parser.c, so
move what I had put into pl_funcs.c into parser.c. Also PGDLLIMPORT'ify
the reference to standard_conforming_strings, per buildfarm results.
per-column options for btree indexes. The planner's support for this is still
pretty rudimentary; it does not yet know how to plan mergejoins with
nondefault ordering options. The documentation is pretty rudimentary, too.
I'll work on improving that stuff later.
Note incompatible change from prior behavior: ORDER BY ... USING will now be
rejected if the operator is not a less-than or greater-than member of some
btree opclass. This prevents less-than-sane behavior if an operator that
doesn't actually define a proper sort ordering is selected.
JOIN, which I removed in a recent fit of over-optimism that we wouldn't
have any future use for it. Now it's needed to support disambiguating
WITH CHECK OPTION from WITH TIME ZONE. As proof of concept, add stub
grammar productions for WITH CHECK OPTION.
not likely ever to be implemented seeing it's been removed from SQL2003.
This allows getting rid of the 'filter' version of yylex() that we had in
parser.c, which should save at least a few microseconds in parsing.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
is measured in kilobytes and checked against actual physical execution
stack depth, as per my proposal of 30-Dec. This gives us a fairly
bulletproof defense against crashing due to runaway recursive functions.
that the types of untyped string-literal constants are deduced (ie,
when coerce_type is applied to 'em, that's what the type must be).
Remove the ancient hack of storing the input Param-types array as a
global variable, and put the info into ParseState instead. This touches
a lot of files because of adjustment of routine parameter lists, but
it's really not a large patch. Note: PREPARE statement still insists on
exact specification of parameter types, but that could easily be relaxed
now, if we wanted to do so.
I had inadvertently omitted it while rearranging things to support
length-counted incoming messages. Also, change the parser's API back
to accepting a 'char *' query string instead of 'StringInfo', as the
latter wasn't buying us anything except overhead. (I think when I put
it in I had some notion of making the parser API 8-bit-clean, but
seeing that flex depends on null-terminated input, that's not really
ever gonna happen.)
Use flex flags -CF. Pass the to-be-scanned string around as StringInfo
type, to avoid querying the length repeatedly. Clean up some code and
remove lex-compatibility cruft. Escape backslash sequences inline. Use
flex-provided yy_scan_buffer() function to set up input, rather than using
myinput().
took some rejiggering of typename and ACL parsing, as well as moving
parse_analyze call out of parser(). Restructure postgres.c processing
so that parse analysis and rewrite are skipped when in abort-transaction
state. Only COMMIT and ABORT statements will be processed beyond the raw
parser() phase. This addresses problem of parser failing with database access
errors while in aborted state (see pghackers discussions around 7/28/00).
Also fix some bugs with COMMIT/ABORT statements appearing in the middle of
a single query input string.
Function, operator, and aggregate arguments/results can now use full
TypeName production, in particular foo[] for array types.
DROP OPERATOR and COMMENT ON OPERATOR were broken for unary operators.
Allow CREATE AGGREGATE to accept unquoted numeric constants for initcond.