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How about trailing commas in SQL?

peter.eisentraut.org

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Re: How about trailing commas in SQL?

#71

Post by tezza »

DonHopkins wrote: post #26
adornKey wrote: post #6

I feel the problem. When coding (not only in SQL) you often have to add something to the end of a list, and it is annoying that the end of the list is always special. You can't just copy some line and move it there. Also when moving things around you always have to take extra care at the end. So, my solution for this was always SELECT a , b , c FROM ... instead of: SELECT a, b, c, -- people want to allow trailing com…

That's as bad as using regular expressions: now you have TWO problems. Why do you seem to think you've cleverly solved the problem, when you've just moved the problem somewhere else just as bad, by blithely messing with the standard formatting conventions universally used by most human written languages and programming languages in the world? Programming languages borrow commas from human written languages, and no hu…

> I would fire and forget any developer who tried to pull that stunt.

A tad bit harsh there?

it is a trade off.

clarity and ease during design time versus slightly uglier but still consistent code as a work around. miniscule energy overhead

Re: How about trailing commas in SQL?

#72

Post by mplanchard »

elric wrote: post #2

Ugh. Why? To make copy/paste programming easier? To make query generation easier? When you're writing code to generate queries, it's worth doing it right. Just about every programming language has an easy way to take an array of strings and add a separator between each element. Like PHP's implode: implode(', ', ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']) == 'foo, bar, baz'. Every time I see a trailing comma, I think "is this a bug? did t…

Might not be so bad if the syntax error for it were better than

  Syntax error at or near ')'

Re: How about trailing commas in SQL?

#73

Post by 8organicbits »

econ wrote: post #61
nickcw wrote: post #7

I feel like this ship has sailed. SQL has been around for more than 50 years and everyone who needs to generate it has already put that extra `if` statement in to suppress trailing commas. What annoys me far more often is the lack of support for trailing commas in JSON.

The closing tags should be optional too. [{},{},,,,{},, Should be fine. Now you can push things to the eof.

You probably want jsonlines. Being able to open a file in append mode without needing to parse the whole thing is great.

https://jsonlines.org/

Re: How about trailing commas in SQL?

#75

Post by Cthulhu_ »

elric wrote: post #2

Ugh. Why? To make copy/paste programming easier? To make query generation easier? When you're writing code to generate queries, it's worth doing it right. Just about every programming language has an easy way to take an array of strings and add a separator between each element. Like PHP's implode: implode(', ', ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']) == 'foo, bar, baz'. Every time I see a trailing comma, I think "is this a bug? did t…

It's not about typing; code is never really about keystrokes. It's about easily moving lines around (up/down, copy paste, etc), diff noise (only one line changed instead of two), etc. See also https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...; it's always been allowed in JS, even though if I recall correctly Internet Explorer didn't allow it.

Anyway, SQL is a different beast entirely, this is specifically about hand-written SQL which needs to be optimised for readability and comprehension, both in the query itself and the diffs changing them. Spreading columns and arguments across multiple lines is common if not mandatory for writing maintainable SQL.

Re: How about trailing commas in SQL?

#76

Post by touseol »

DonHopkins wrote: post #26
adornKey wrote: post #6

I feel the problem. When coding (not only in SQL) you often have to add something to the end of a list, and it is annoying that the end of the list is always special. You can't just copy some line and move it there. Also when moving things around you always have to take extra care at the end. So, my solution for this was always SELECT a , b , c FROM ... instead of: SELECT a, b, c, -- people want to allow trailing com…

That's as bad as using regular expressions: now you have TWO problems. Why do you seem to think you've cleverly solved the problem, when you've just moved the problem somewhere else just as bad, by blithely messing with the standard formatting conventions universally used by most human written languages and programming languages in the world? Programming languages borrow commas from human written languages, and no hu…

What your mind rejects, mine finds freeing. What's idiomatic and natural depends on personal experience and evolves, as does the culture around you. There was a time in my life when I may have rejected leading commas as well, but at some point I came around to them and have never looked back. It works for me. I legitimately find it easier on my mind, and it has caused me far fewer annoyances than a comma-less last column has. I have colleagues that use it as well out of their own preference. I would suggest that insisting on a universal orthodoxy of stylistic preferences is much more oppressing to the spirit than occasionally needing to adapt the mind to the reading of something formatted in an unfamiliar style.

Re: How about trailing commas in SQL?

#77

Post by Cthulhu_ »

reddalo wrote: post #11
nickcw wrote: post #7

I feel like this ship has sailed. SQL has been around for more than 50 years and everyone who needs to generate it has already put that extra `if` statement in to suppress trailing commas. What annoys me far more often is the lack of support for trailing commas in JSON.

> lack of support for trailing commas in JSON This, 100%! And the lack of comments.

JSON5 allows comments, it's been around since 2012. That said, JSON is not meant for humans / manual editing, and deciding to use it for configuration files was a mistake.

Re: How about trailing commas in SQL?

#78

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

masklinn wrote: post #5
elric wrote: post #2

Ugh. Why? To make copy/paste programming easier? To make query generation easier? When you're writing code to generate queries, it's worth doing it right. Just about every programming language has an easy way to take an array of strings and add a separator between each element. Like PHP's implode: implode(', ', ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']) == 'foo, bar, baz'. Every time I see a trailing comma, I think "is this a bug? did t…

To make writing and maintaining sql easier. To make sql diffs better. To make sql more consistent with other languages. Every time this trips me up, it’s hand written SQL, because literally every other language I routinely use supports trailing commas. The additional complexity during codegen is barely existent. If you’re using an orm or code generator this will be an issue once at most (if and when you write your ow…

> To make writing and maintaining sql easier.

From my experience there are a lot of programmers that simply don't write SQL at all. They use an ORM or some query building library in their preferred programming language. So they're the ones that don't understand the problem when handwriting SQL, because they simply don't do it. Even the parent comment here is talking about PHP array syntax instead of SQL.

I write all of my queries directly in SQL, and I run into the trailing comma issue somewhat frequently. It's a minor annoyance, but I've just been dealing with it forever and accepted it.

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