At 12:33 2014-09-11, Ted Roche <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 3:02 PM, Gene Wirchenko <[email protected]> wrote:
[snip]
> At one point, I had a table with a column called "status".
> Everything was going fine until I wanted to check the value in one row and
> typed list or display status. I did not get what I was expecting. I
> changed the column name.
>
Table and field names can be real problems. I've run into errors while
porting "APPEND and REPLACE" systems into SQL statements. Apparently, the
xBase parser could work out the difference between keywords and fieldnames,
but the SQL parser was more finicky.
Another way to look at it is laziness. <BEG>
Some languages (e.g. SQL Server) treat a reserved word as
reserved, period. This has the advantage of simplicity, and you do
not get into using a reserved word as a variable by accident.
Others only treat a reserved word that way where the reserved
word can appear as a reserved word. (dBASE and VFP for two) Any
other place, the reserved word is just another identifier and so it
can be used as a variable name, etc.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
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