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I'm thinking that the book I learned Pascal from back in 1981 used a similar notation (if not identical) for showing syntax. Of course with nearly 30 years inte
by dhosek 6y ago
I'm thinking that the book I learned Pascal from back in 1981 used a similar notation (if not identical) for showing syntax. Of course with nearly 30 years intervening, I can't come up with the name of the book, let alone the book itself nor can I be 100% certain that I remember what the syntax diagrams looked like.
- setr 6y agoFYI The syntax duagram is called a railroad diagram, and is particularly common in RDBMS docs (probably because SQL syntax is basically nonsense)
- Twixes 6y agoIt's quite amazing that all these years on, SQL is still king. There are basically no rules for the syntax, how come nothing cleaner replaced it in RDBMSes?
- setr 6y agoTwo things I think: it ultimately doesn't matter, because the key differentiator between RDBMS selection is the management system, not the query system And second is that RDBMS's are historically closed-source enterprise tooling -- the vendors themselves have little interest rocking the boat, and there's not much freedom for the community to inject a new language into the system (except as ad-hoc, wonky transpilers, or framework wrappers like ORMs)