table_name syntax

[Mark Taylor]

Just when you thought this thread was thankfully dead and buried ...

On Tue, 28 Apr 2015, Patrick Dowler wrote:

> In Sybase, the convention semes to be that schema support is sketchy and
> people generally use the catalog as both allocation and namespace. So, if
> someone implements a TAP service on Sybase, they would quite likely want to
> expose tablenames line foo..bar (implicit schema between the two dots). Yeah,
> that's all kinds of ugly but this is what people do.

I don't think that foo..bar is a legal ADQL <table_name>.

(I'm not 100% certain, because it depends what the symbol "..." means
in the BNF from Appendix A of ADQL 2.0, i.e. whether it works
like a regex "*" or "+"; I don't see that symbol discussed in e.g.
the wikipedia BNF page.  However, if foo..bar is legal, then
zero-length <identifier>s must be legal too, which sounds unlikely
and bad in equal measures.)

I'm not suggesting we need to do anything about this now, but my
inner pedant wouldn't let me go without mentioning it.

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/