Your example is entirely wrong. Spreadsheet apps explicitly define the behavior, and provide functionality, for defaulting the attributes for unused cells.
A better example is this: looking at your paper mail and asking "why didn't mail posted on the same day from the same sender arrive on the same day?" The order of an unordered result is unspecified. There is a good reason for that: it's too complex to describe, or it's just not possible, for example when probabilistic optimisation is used. It's not an arbitrary restriction. Anyone asking why the order is what it is is not a valid question, regardless of their curiosity. Maybe if they really, really want to know they should read the code. On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 9:11 AM, Jean-Christophe Deschamps <j...@antichoc.net > wrote: > Richard, > > At 02:00 12/01/2017, you wrote: > > The "PRAGMA reverse_unordered_selects=ON" statement has long been >> available to do this. But it is an optional feature that has to be >> turned on. And I don't think anybody ever turns it on. My proposal >> is to make it random. >> >> Maybe it would be sufficient to initialize the >> reverse_unordered_selects setting to a random value (on or off) inside >> of sqlite3_open(). >> > > I read this as a provocative joke. > > While I agree with you that way too many users and applications blindly > (naively?) rely on the current behavior, willfully making the order more or > less random by default would be similar, say for a spreadsheet app, to > choose random font, size, centering, coloring and formatting of any cell > where those attributes have not been explicitely set. > > Ask yourself, but I for one wouldn't make much use of such a spreadsheet > app, even if some standard says it's legitimate behavior. > > If you ask somebody to enumerate strictly positive integers less than 6, > 99.999% of people expect the answer to be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. While 2, 5, 4, 1, > 3 is a perfectly valid answer, anyone would ask "Why this funny order?". > > > _______________________________________________ > sqlite-users mailing list > sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org > http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users > _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
