Improve parser's one-extra-token lookahead mechanism

Enterprise / PostgreSQL - Tom Lane [sss.pgh.pa.us] - 24 February 2015 16:53 UTC

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.

d809fd0 Improve parser's one-extra-token lookahead mechanism.
src/backend/parser/gram.y | 35 ++++++---
src/backend/parser/parser.c | 105 ++++++++++++++-----------
src/include/parser/gramparse.h | 2 +
src/interfaces/ecpg/preproc/parse.pl | 6 +-
src/interfaces/ecpg/preproc/parser.c | 116 ++++++++++++++++------------
src/test/regress/expected/foreign_data.out | 2 +-
src/test/regress/expected/with.out | 15 ++++
src/test/regress/sql/with.sql | 5 ++
8 files changed, 173 insertions(+), 113 deletions(-)

Upstream: git.postgresql.org

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