Dashes should be allowed in collection names

[Dimitar Misev]

Right now it seems that rasdaman doesn't allow (parsing fails I believe) any '-' in collection names.

To reproduce just try to create a collection name that contains '-', e.g.

create collection test-2 GreySet

[Peter Baumann]

indeed, collection names must be regular identifiers, as known from programming languages - see flex source in qlparser/. I haven't seen a requirement to change this, nor a comprehensive list of what should be allowed in addition - before changing anything here it should be great to see that.

The original idea during rasdaman design anyway was that metadata offer any kind of naming (incl. whitespace, national charsets, etc.), and collection names are just an internal interface. So maybe we can fix this by having service operators use a metadata table (which might be good for many purposes) defined by them?

[Dimitar Misev]

It seems that tables in SQL similarly can't have '-' in the name. The way they go to allow such extra characters is typically by quoting the name, and always referring to it with quotes (e.g. in ​postgres).

We could go similarly about this, add another rule to the lexer to allow anything inbetween double quotes for a collection name?

The '-' question came up by EOX and MEEO if I remember correctly.

[Dimitar Misev]

I'd guess that allowing '-', '.', etc. might confuse the lexer and result in some unwanted subtractions or similar issues.

[Dimitar Misev]

Ok, I resolve this as "will be fixed in petascope by #310", whereas in rasql we stick to the current situation.