+1 in favor of removing non-standard quoting mechanism #3.
----- Original Message ----
From: D. Richard Hipp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: General Discussion of SQLite Database <sqlite-users@sqlite.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 7, 2008 10:26:07 AM
Subject: [sqlite] Proposed removal of (mis-)feature
String literals in SQL are suppose to be enclosed in single-quotes -
Pascal-style. Double-quotes are used around table and/or column names
in cases where the name would otherwise be a keyword or when the name
contains non-standard characters.
But SQLite tries to be flexible and accommodating. To this end, it
accepts some non-standard quoting mechanisms:
1. Names can be enclosed in [...] for compatibility with Access
and SQLServer.
2. Names can be enclosed in grave accents for compatibility with
MySQL.
3. Double-quoted names fall back to being string literals if
there is no matching table or column name.
In retrospect, (3) seems to be a bad idea. It is accident-prone and
leads to all kinds of confusion. For example, if double-quotes are
being used correctly (which is to say to quote table or column names)
but a misspelling occurs in the name, the token reverts to being a
string literal rather than throwing an error. Or if a double-quoted
string really is being used as a string literal, but later a new
column is added to a table that has the same name as the string text,
the string literal will suddenly take on the value of the column. It
seems like we have one or two problem reports per month on this
mailing list that involve people using double-quoted names where they
should be using single-quoted string literals instead.
So I'm giving some thought to removing feature (3) above and
disallowing double-quoted string literals. My concern is, though,
that this might break many existing applications.
What opinion do you, gentle users, have of this matter?
D. Richard Hipp
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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