Re: comment on A.7 "Grammar" (punctuationSyntax)

On 11 Jun 2006, at 20:21, Seaborne, Andy wrote:

>>>> I hope I've shown that expressions in SELECT are possible.
>>> You have, but not that it's particularly pleasant syntax.
>> I'm also inclined to add the commas in the SELECT syntax.
>> I personally type it that way all the time. That in itself
>> isn't new information... I'm not sure if the future consideration
>> of expressions in select is new information or not... but
>> then there's the addition of ORDER BY to the language... none
>> of those by themselves was enough to get us to reconsider, but
>> putting them altogether looks like a pretty good case, to me.
>> Making them optional would be friendly to existing code and queries,
>> though it's kinda gross. I don't have a strong opinion in any
>> direction.
>
> Technical note: Optional commas don't work (for the motivation of  
> expressions in the SELECT clause without brackets) because the  
> comma is used to know an expression has ended and isn't followed  
> by, say, "+ ?x" which is otherwise ambiguous.  Ditto ORDER BY.

While were thinking about possible tweaks, something else that's a  
bit odd is that ASC and DESC have function-like syntax, required  
because ORDER BY doesn't have commas I guess. We could have the more  
SQLy ORDER BY ASC ?x, DESC ?y.

- Steve

Received on Sunday, 11 June 2006 21:42:28 UTC