Oh come on. You are basically arguing that Python is just syntax, not a programming language; it's just the interpreter that parses the text and makes it go. No

Oh come on. You are basically arguing that Python is just syntax, not a programming language; it's just the interpreter that parses the text and makes it go. No duh! You've made a distinction without a difference. If an XML dialect were to be parsed by a processor to declaratively perform a sequence of tasks, the AST is not relevant to this discussion, only the tasks being performed. The XML dialect—the semantic structure behind it—is what I'm discussing. JSON and XML as they are used today are "just syntax", but they are examples of syntax that almost universally are parsed directly into data structures. The Liquibase XML dialect on the other hand moves beyond a simple data structure into a declarative language for migrating database structures from one form to another by virtue of the Liquibase engine. SQL is not "just syntax" any more than your speech is "just phonemes". Yes, English, Xhosa, and Mandarin are all just collections of phonemes. All written languages are "just syntax" waiting to be processed by smart meat. It is needlessly reductive. SQL absolutely implies execution in a way that JSON/XML do not. However, the style of execution is clearly different between SQL and C#. That style can accurately be described as set-oriented execution, at a higher level than 3rd-gen languages such as Python or C#. Writing a parser for SQL (or XHTML) is a very different exercise from processing the AST from that parsed SQL/XHTML if that processing happens immediately after the parsing step and is largely driven by that AST. Relational database engines are interpreters for SQL.