At 15:13 12/01/2017, you wrote:
Re: "I read this as a provocative joke."
I didn't read it as just a joke.
The analogy with random fonts, etc. breaks down, I think, because
randomizing the ordering would be an attempt to *improve* sqlite's
usability -- not some pedantic punishment.
I read this, as well as Hick previous reply. I'm well aware of the
issue, which is in no way specific to SQLite.
Yet, providing some new SQLite build (source, amalgamation binaries)
someday where the result order would be willingly random or different
from the current behavior (call it natural or naively expectable or
intuitive or whatelse) will break uncountable uses where the app isn't
open to change. Remember that in many situations SQLite is being used
as a loadable component either because the original code was designed
so or because the language used can't statically link.
So it could be an improvement for *-future-* SQLite apps, or rather a
good reminder aimed towards developpers, but that would potentially
break gazillions legacy uses or at the very least cause a huge lot of
unnecessary inconveniences. Expect a tsunami of disapprovals.
If a user has problems with her sqlite output early in the process,
leading
to the discovery of a missing "ORDER BY" clause, the argument is that she
has been dealt a favor. It's vastly worse for her to encounter a
mysterious bug when the sqlite version is updated years from now to one
which (perfectly correctly) returns a different ordering for that same
query.
Further, Dr. Hipp and his team won't have to deal with howls of "it's
broken" when such a version is released.
I also have to repeatedly point out in the community where I offer
support that SQL deals with unordered sets and to the consequence, that
issuing the very same SELECT twice in a row could rightfully return
results in different orders when no ORDER BY clause is specified. But
I bet such an uncalled change (as salutary as it may be from a rational
point of view) would result in a long term continuous higher saturation
of this list and other support channels with posts from
questionning/angry/disappointed users.
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