Improve parser's one-extra-token lookahead mechanism.
Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Improve parser's one-extra-token lookahead mechanism. 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.
Files
| Path | Change | +/− |
|---|---|---|
| src/backend/parser/gram.y | modified | +25 −10 |
| src/backend/parser/parser.c | modified | +58 −47 |
| src/include/parser/gramparse.h | modified | +2 −0 |
| src/interfaces/ecpg/preproc/parse.pl | modified | +2 −4 |
| src/interfaces/ecpg/preproc/parser.c | modified | +65 −51 |
| src/test/regress/expected/foreign_data.out | modified | +1 −1 |
| src/test/regress/expected/with.out | modified | +15 −0 |
| src/test/regress/sql/with.sql | modified | +5 −0 |