Re: factorial function/phase out postfix operators?

> On Aug 24, 2020, at 12:28 AM, John Naylor <john.naylor@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 5:03 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> 
>> Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
>>> What are the thoughts about then marking the postfix operator deprecated
>>> and eventually removing it?
>> 
>> If we do this it'd require a plan.  We'd have to also warn about the
>> feature deprecation in (at least) the CREATE OPERATOR man page, and
>> we'd have to decide how many release cycles the deprecation notices
>> need to stand for.
>> 
>> If that's the intention, though, it'd be good to get those deprecation
>> notices published in v13 not v14.
> 
> I imagine the release candidates are not too far away by now, and if
> we are confident enough in the direction the patches in this thread
> are going, we should probably consider a deprecation notice soon.

If so, we might want to also update the deprecation warning for the prefix !! operator in pg_operator.dat:

{ oid => '389', descr => 'deprecated, use ! instead',
  oprname => '!!', oprkind => 'l', oprleft => '0', oprright => 'int8',
  oprresult => 'numeric', oprcode => 'numeric_fac' },

That will be the only remaining factorial operator if we remove postfix operators.

—
Mark Dilger
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company