c6b3c939b7
While the SQL standard is pretty vague on the overall topic of operator precedence (because it never presents a unified BNF for all expressions), it does seem reasonable to conclude from the spec for <boolean value expression> that OR has the lowest precedence, then AND, then NOT, then IS tests, then the six standard comparison operators, then everything else (since any non-boolean operator in a WHERE clause would need to be an argument of one of these). We were only sort of on board with that: most notably, while "<" ">" and "=" had properly low precedence, "<=" ">=" and "<>" were treated as generic operators and so had significantly higher precedence. And "IS" tests were even higher precedence than those, which is very clearly wrong per spec. Another problem was that "foo NOT SOMETHING bar" constructs, such as "x NOT LIKE y", were treated inconsistently because of a bison implementation artifact: they had the documented precedence with respect to operators to their right, but behaved like NOT (i.e., very low priority) with respect to operators to their left. Fixing the precedence issues is just a small matter of rearranging the precedence declarations in gram.y, except for the NOT problem, which requires adding an additional lookahead case in base_yylex() so that we can attach a different token precedence to NOT LIKE and allied two-word operators. The bulk of this patch is not the bug fix per se, but adding logic to parse_expr.c to allow giving warnings if an expression has changed meaning because of these precedence changes. These warnings are off by default and are enabled by the new GUC operator_precedence_warning. It's believed that very few applications will be affected by these changes, but it was agreed that a warning mechanism is essential to help debug any that are.
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