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SQL was developed in the 1970s, there’s no way they’d waste all those bytes to spell out UNKNOWN and INDETERMINATE.
by labster 2y ago
SQL was developed in the 1970s, there’s no way they’d waste all those bytes to spell out UNKNOWN and INDETERMINATE.
- ChoHag 2y ago[dead]
- jandrese 2y agoHave you ever seen SQL? Blowing lots of bytes on a query was not a concern. They could have made a much more compact syntax with little effort, but it wouldn't have looked kind of like English the way SQL does. You could imagine a world where instead of: SELECT ( email, name, outstanding_balance ) FROM accounts WHERE outstanding_balance > 0 AND last_payment > 60 ORDER BY name the queries looked more like: accounts: outstanding_balance > 0 & last_payment > 60 => email, ^name, outstanding_balance There were plenty of contemporary languages that looked like the latter, but few survive to this day. SQL's relative verbosity was not seen as a problem then and is definitely not one today. Besides, if the verbosity was a problem they could easily shorten it to UNK. That would have been perfectly normal.