I have a sizeable ESQL application that I originally ported from Oracle to FB
1.0.x (SuSE Linux 9.0). In doing this, I wrote my own NVL and NULLIF UDFs.
I've been playing around with FB 1.5.1 and yesterday installed the final
1.5.1. After seeing that everything worked, I decided to sustitute COALESCE
for NVL in my code. Helen's book (p. 411) says that COALESCE is available in
ESQL but when I try to compile a file, I get errors in EXEC SQL commands
where I use COALESCE:

$ /opt/firebird/bin/gpre -c -n -m o_process.e
(E) o_process.e:234: expected FROM, encountered "("
(E) o_process.e:302: expected FROM, encountered "("
2 errors, no warnings

Line 234, for example, looks like

232 ...
232 EXEC SQL
233 SELECT
234 procid, COALESCE(procname,' '), wfmcstate,
235 ...

COALESCE does work from ISQL. What am I missing in ESQL?
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