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You know what I would love beyond all measure? No longer needing to use commas between the items after the SELECT and before the FROM. Wouldn’t that be nice? W

You know what I would love beyond all measure? No longer needing to use commas between the items after the SELECT and before the FROM. Wouldn’t that be nice? We don’t need to use commas in between joins and items in the WHERE clauses. I get that there is probably some syntax reason for this, but I would like to know why.

BeefWellington 5y ago
You can do a lot to a field that isn't just "give me this field name" like running functions, aliasing it as another name, etc. If you're doing a simple: SELECT a b c d FROM table I can understand the appeal, but when you're doing: SELECT CAST(a AS VARCHAR(8)) as cast_a b c d FROM table There's no obvious syntactical way to separate those out, especially since you can get really complex in how you assemble things like aliases when you get into functions, stored procedures, subselets, etc. PostgreSQL's cast operator syntax (::DATATYPE) can help a bit but it hasn't been standardized.