OT: Punctuation-starved Programming Languages

[Don Y]

Jay West wrote:
> You wrote...
>> 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.
> Pick et. al. didn't use punctionation, no commas, no periods, no 
> parenthesis... just the obvious comparison operators and quotes.

So, how would you implement this example?

SELECT book, author FROM titles
WHERE isbn_publisher(book) > isbn_publisher('1-234-56789-X'::isbn);

Specifically:
- return the values of the "book" and "author" fields
- from the "titles" table
- for those records in which the "isbn_publisher()" [1] function
   returns a value that exceeds that of the isbn_publisher()'s
   value for the isbn data type [2] corresponding to the string
   representation "1-234-56789-X"

[1] defined a returning the value of the Publisher Identifier
in the ISBN argument -- "234" in the second instance, here
[2] the "::isbn" is an explicit type cast in this case from
a string to an "isbn"