On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 02:47:16PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 2:36 PM, Ian Lawrence Barwick <barwick@gmail.com> wrote:
> > As a British native speaker involved in translating some PostgreSQL-related
> > Japanese text, all I can say is "yes please". (Although for true Japanese
> > support, the grammar would have to be pretty much reversed, with the verb
> > being placed last; and WHERE would come before SELECT, which might
> > challenge the parser a little).
>
> I am personally of the opinion that whoever designed SQL was far too
> concerned about making it look like English and insufficiently
> concerned about making it pleasant to use. Since the target list
> comes before the FROM clause, you see (or must write) what you want to
> select from which table aliases before defining what those table
> aliases mean. Overall, you end up with an organization where you
> define the aliases in the middle, and then half the stuff that uses
> those definitions is at the beginning (in the target list) while the
> other half is at the end (in the WHERE clause). Strange!
>
> But, it's a standard, so, we live with it. And, none of the query
> languages I've designed have gained quite as much traction as SQL, so
> who am I to complain?
It is confusing to explain to people that in a SELECT, everything from
the FROM clause down is executed in order, then the target list.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +
