Re: Poll: are people okay with function/operator table redesign?

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>, Steven Pousty <steve.pousty@gmail.com>, Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>, Isaac Morland <isaac.morland@gmail.com>, Pierre Giraud <pierre.giraud@dalibo.com>, PostgreSQL Developers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2020-04-18T20:36:17Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 6:30 PM David G. Johnston
> <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I feel like writing them as:
>> + (date, integer) -> date
>> makes more sense as they are mainly sorted on the operator symbol as opposed to the left operand.

> I thought about that, too, but I think the way Tom did it is better.
> It's much more natural to see it using the syntax with which it will
> actually be invoked.

Just for the record, I experimented with putting back an "operator name"
column, as attached.  I think it could be argued either way whether this
is an improvement or not.

Some notes:

* The column seems annoyingly wide, but the only way to make it narrower
is to narrow or eliminate the column title, which could be confusing.
Also, if there's not a fair amount of whitespace, it looks as if the
initial name is part of the signature, which is *really* confusing,
cf second screenshot.  (I'm not sure why the vertical rule is rendered
so much more weakly in this case, but it is.)

* I also tried it with valign="middle" to center the operator name among
its entries.  This was *not* an improvement, it largely breaks the
ability to see which entries belong to the name.

			regards, tom lane

Commits

  1. Doc: re-re-revise markup for tables of functions.

  2. Doc: revise formatting of function/operator tables.