Placeholder blues

There has been some debate going on on the hackers list about problems certain drivers have with operators that contain the ? character. Since drivers such as the JDBC driver consider any such character outside of quote marks to be a parameter placeholder, its use as part of an operator makes life difficult for them. Part of the problem has been that we allow almost every available non-alphanumeric ASCII character to be a part of an operator. Why, for example, do we allow `? I've never seen it that I can recall, but the fact means we can't use it for something else (such as marking an operator). That makes doing anything about the problem hard. Some people want to deprecate the use of ? in operators. I think it's far too late for that - its use is far too widespread.