This PR will lead us towards the Promised Day, for in its wake there shall be much celebration and ecstasy as this world becomes a world suitable for developer hegemony. The first strike is thusly;
All << is converted into to_chat().
The system used to be of complexity O(n^2). Essentially two for loops running per every argument. Which ended up being surprisingly slow (there were instances where I saw the argument parser as using quite a lot of CPU time).
This replaces it with a more linear algorithm. It's somewhere near O(n) where n is the length of the unparsed query. Which is more stable and faaaster. This comes with two changes, however:
Parameters inside the query now have to be delimited from both sides with : (colons). The alternative to this would be to use something like $n or just assume that space marks the end of a marker. Only the former is workable, the latter would break a few queries already.
Arguments in the argument array no longer have to be prefixed by : (colons). So, while in the query you would write :thing:, you'd initialize the array of args as: list("thing" = somevar). It could be made to work without it, but eh, I think this is fine.
Argument validation is slightly weaker. What I mean by this is that with the old system, unused keys would result in an error. This is no longer a thing. Missing keys will still result in an error, however.
One more improvement: double delimiting removes an edge case where if key A partially covers key B, depending on the order, key A would mangle key B.
Updated and tested all queries that I could find. So this should be good.
Both procs are now generalized, and accept a DBConnection object as an argument. Due to this generalization, all instances of `establish_db_connection()` must be renamed to `establish_db_connection(dbcon)`.
Also added variable `failed_connections` to the definition of DBConnection.
