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A comment on SQL databases come up with algorithms you’d never have dreamed of (2017) [video]. Parent comment

Re:SQL databases come up with algorithms you’d never have dr... by afandian on Saturday April 06, 2019 @11:36AM (#19591233)
I was coming from the Lisp perspective! Or at least Clojure...

Maybe it's a language issue. I would say a 'loop' has a jump and a condition. So that's 'for', 'while' and 'do' in C, JS, Python, Pascal, Java...

Lots of languages including Lisp have recursion, maps etc but I wouldn't call that looping. Clojure even has TCO recursion but it only returns one value, not a sequence (unless you accumulate the whole thing)

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Re:SQL databases come up with algorithms you’d never have dr... by taeric on Saturday April 06, 2019 @12:15PM (#19591455)
But even the LOOP macro has returned values for a long time. It isn't even hard to see how the new stream/collect API if Java is just approaching what LOOP has been doing for decades.
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Re:SQL databases come up with algorithms you’d never have dr... by dfox on Saturday April 06, 2019 @12:34PM (#19591562)
Java's streams implement the same idea as Common Lisp's streams, which were supposed to be more Common Lisp-like replacement for LOOP (eg. composable and with syntax that does not involve string comparison of symbols). That idea was droped from the final ANSI standard.
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Re:SQL databases come up with algorithms you’d never have dr... by lispm on Saturday April 06, 2019 @01:01PM (#19591703)
SERIES, not streams.
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Re:SQL databases come up with algorithms you’d never have dr... by afandian on Saturday April 06, 2019 @12:31PM (#19591548)
OK agreed there's a construct called loop that returns a single value. My original point was that list comprehensions are closer to sql projections than loops.
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Re:SQL databases come up with algorithms you’d never have dr... by taeric on Saturday April 06, 2019 @01:06PM (#19591730)
Apologies, I meant my point more as amusement than winning an argument.

I am just now reading Practical Common Lisp, and amusingly one of the first things they do is build a simple query language. Didn't even use loop. So, to your point, the imperative commands of looping can be far removed from what people today call comprehensions. That said, I don't think it is inherent. Just a quirk of history.

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Re:SQL databases come up with algorithms you’d never have dr... by afandian on Saturday April 06, 2019 @05:46PM (#19593207)
No point scoring inferred. In fact, it's a great illustration of different language and technology communities taking words and ideas and implementing them differently, crucially, with different degrees of specificity.
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