From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
cc: "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>,
        "y.saburov@gmail.com" <y.saburov@gmail.com>,
        "pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org" <pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: generated constraint name
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Comments: In-reply-to Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
	message dated "Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:11:42 +0200"
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Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2025 11:13:00 -0400
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Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> writes:
> On 07.04.25 15:34, David G. Johnston wrote:
>> I feel like that whole parenthetical should just go away.  The point of 
>> the comment is to remind the user of how identifier values work with 
>> respect to mandatory double quoting.  The name itself, other than having 
>> a $, has no special importance.

> I think generated constraint names were generally "$1", "$2", etc. at 
> some point, instead of the more readable ones you get today.  But this 
> must be ancient.

Good point.  A bit of git-blame'ing shows that this documentation
wording appeared in e560dd353 of 2003-11-05, but we changed the
generation rule to not be "$n" in 45616f5bb of 2004-06-10.
(Oddly, I moved this documentation text around in 2005 without
noticing it was obsolete; or perhaps I did realize that but figured
it was still applicable to versions in the field.)

I concur with David that we should just drop the para.  It's merely
confusing now.  If you have a generated constraint name, it won't
require double-quoting unless your table or column name does, and
if they do you are doubtless already quite familiar with how
quoting works.

			regards, tom lane