[DB-SIG] Oracle no longer wants positional arguments!

[Jim Fulton]

I happen to be working on a new Oracle module that needs to
work with Oracle 8 and I noticed something interesting.

The Oracle OCI call, obindrn, that lets you use positional
placeholders, as in:

  select * from spam
  where foo=:1

is now considered "obsolete"!

Oracle wants you to use named variables, like:

  select * from spam
  where foo=:foo

Aparently, you were already (at least in Oracle 7)
not allowed to use positional placeholders in PL/SQL
blocks.

Oops. ;-)

Maybe we should think about a less position-oriented interface, 
perhaps using keyword arguments or a dictionary 
to pass values into execute.

(Note that I'd still prefer a more function-like
 interface, as in:

   f=connection.prepare(some_sql)
   result=f(arg1=v1, arg2=v2)
)

Jim

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