Craig> I just wish they hadn't written it backwards!
Craig> It'd be much less confusing were it formulated as something Craig> like:
Craig> SELECT FROM thetable WHERE first_letter > 'a' RESULTS Craig> left(value,1) AS first_letter
Craig> or something, where the order is more obvious. I really Craig> dislike the way SQL is written not-quite-backwards.
It's not "written backwards", it's plain natural language semantics: "give me the first letter of all records where the first letter is greater than a". Refining a set is better done walking from the more general set to a subset, not the other way around, IMO: "give me all persons that are females and over the age of 20". Mathematical set builder notation does this in a similar fashion, for the same reason.
Natural language semantics will get you into trouble though. After all, I think Lisp follows natural language semantics remarkably closely if your natural language is Irish Gaelic....
