Good question, my answer was misleading. It changes virtually nothing in the parse or in the resulting AST. Writing the parser as a process has made me (even)

Good question, my answer was misleading. It changes virtually nothing in the parse or in the resulting AST. Writing the parser as a process has made me (even) more familiar with SQL syntax and semantics and understand it better, which has only increased my disgust[1] of the whole matted thorny snarl that it is. I was asking for a dose of rationality for Lil, not a syntactic infection inherited from a misdesigned language. HTH. (BTW the designers of SQL knew well that it had other problems and admitted them, eg. search for "A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels"). [1] yeah, that's the right word.