Re: An Analogy ?

Tony Douglas wrote:

> Here's a Monday morning throw-at-the-wall post for everyone !
>
> Reading some of the recent posts, I got around to thinking about
> FORTRAN and SQL as analgous to each other. In both cases, they were
> essentially experiments to show that something could be done (in
> FORTRAN's case, that a compiler could produce executables almost as
> efficient as hand-written assembler code, in SQL's case as part of an
> experiment to show that a "relational" system could work). In both
> cases, special cases and "clever" workarounds to problems to allow the
> experiment to work became embedded in the experiment (e.g. the close
> tie-in between FORTRAN's control structures and the IBM mainframe
> model it was originally built on).
>
> And, I would go on to suggest, both experiments have outlived their
> genuine usefulness and served to impede progress in their respective
> areas (that is, we're still stuck with FORTRAN 9x and SQL:2003).
>
> Any thoughts, anyone ?
>
> - Tony

Well, if somebody were to produce a better relational query language tommorrow, the commercial vendors could implement it as an alternate interface to the data, without in any way touching their current SQL implementations. In fact, presumably it would generate the same execution plans.

-- 
Kenneth Downs
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