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 <barw...@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 <br...@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com + It's impossible for everything to be true. + -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
