OT: Punctuation-starved Programming Languages

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Don Y wrote:
> Chuck Guzis wrote:
>> On 6/21/2006 at 2:34 PM jim stephens wrote:
>>
>>>>> This looks a lot like SQL...  Do you know if SQL was based on Pick?
>>
>> Aren't most database query languages fairly punctuation-poor when 
>> compared
>> to general-purpose programming languages? I'm thinking of one of early
>> examples--MEDLARS.  I seem to recall very little punctuation in the query
>> language used there.
> 
> That depends.  For example, SQL requires a terminating semicolon.
> And, uses parens in many cases.  Plus commas, etc.  And, of course,
> any expressional notation uses typical punctuation.
> 
> For example:
> 
> SELECT book, author FROM titles
> WHERE isbn_publisher(book) > isbn_publisher('1-234-56789-X'::isbn);
> 
> Plus, the "programming language" variants of those "query
> languages" are almost as punctuation-rich as typical languages.

I thought the SQL ; was implementation-specific, and just happened to be 
used in many implementations?

Peace...  Sridhar