Hacker News Reader

Wow, I never would have guessed that ORDER BY stuff was part of the standard. Seems like one of the special corners of SQL.

From that brief read of the ANSI Spec it seems like one would need a great deal of time and some advanced mathematics to understand it.

View on HN

There isn't really any math involved. It's just a lot of edge cases written out in lots of detail.

I think a lot of what makes SQL hard to implement comes down to consistently prioritizing local convenience over global complexity, combined with not being able to break backwards compatibility to simplify the design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com