Darren New wrote:
> SharkD wrote:
>> It's also the choice of words that are used for some of the commands 
>> that irks me.
> 
> That's because you're thinking procedurally instead of declaritively.

Indeed.

Although it still annoys me that the Haskell standard function for 
selecting elements of a list is called "filter", not "select". The 
number of times I've done something like

   filter invalid_item my_list

when in fact I should have done

   filter (not . invalid_item) my_list

is just infuriating...

Smalltalk did it right. They had "select" and "reject". Makes it quite 
clear...

> That said, SQL is indeed one of those languages for which I regularly 
> have to look up the syntax even for simple stuff. :-)

Heh, do you have any idea how many commands Oracle has that have syntax like

   ALTER TABLESPACE BEGIN BACKUP;
   ALTER DATABASE OPEN;
   ALTER SYSTEM RESETLOGS;
   etc.

??

The manual has these huge, multi-page railroad diagrams to explain the 
syntax. Sadly, nobody thought to write down WHAT THE SYNTAX *MEANS*!! >_<

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message