PostgreSQL and the SQL standards process [LWN.net]

PostgreSQL and the SQL standards process

Posted Sep 24, 2011 21:16 UTC (Sat) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312)
Parent article: PostgreSQL and the SQL standards process

What I want to know is how did the SQL standards process come to specify requirements that suggest extraordinarily bad taste. And by bad taste I mean inventing new commonplace functions that require special grammar rules to parse correctly. Such as the following:

SUBSTRING(s FROM x FOR y)
TRIM(LEADING ' ' FROM s)
POSITION('-' IN s)
EXTRACT(MONTH FROM d)

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Old fashions

Posted Sep 27, 2011 7:59 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Maybe people who used to be COBOL programmers? Actually, syntax that tries to mimic natural language used to be a very common style in old domain-specific languages, the theory being that it makes them self-documenting.