Now that we require C99, we can depend on __VA_ARGS__ to work, and
revising ereport() to use it has several significant benefits:

* The extra parentheses around the auxiliary function calls are now
optional.  Aside from being a bit less ugly, this removes a common
gotcha for new contributors, because in some cases the compiler errors
you got from forgetting them were unintelligible.

* The auxiliary function calls are now evaluated as a comma expression
list rather than as extra arguments to errfinish().  This means that
compilers can be expected to warn about no-op expressions in the list,
allowing detection of several other common mistakes such as forgetting
to add errmsg(...) when converting an elog() call to ereport().

* Unlike the situation with extra function arguments, comma expressions
are guaranteed to be evaluated left-to-right, so this removes platform
dependency in the order of the auxiliary function calls.  While that
dependency hasn't caused us big problems in the past, this change does
allow dropping some rather shaky assumptions around errcontext() domain
handling.

There's no intention to make wholesale changes of existing ereport
calls, but as proof-of-concept this patch removes the extra parens
from a couple of calls in postgres.c.

While new code can be written either way, code intended to be
back-patched will need to use extra parens for awhile yet.  It seems
worth back-patching this change into v12, so as to reduce the window
where we have to be careful about that by one year.  Hence, this patch
is careful to preserve ABI compatibility; a followup HEAD-only patch
will make some additional simplifications.

Andres Freund and Tom Lane

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+fd4k6N8EjNvZpM8nme+y+05mz-SM8Z_BgkixzkA34R+ej0Kw@mail.gmail.com