Re:Best practices for writing SQL queries
by hn_throwaway_99 on Saturday April 10, 2021 @01:19PM
(#26763155)
Another commenter showed how this works:
While the comma placement may seem weird, it makes this exactly identical to the "AND" or "OR" placement in WHERE clauses, and the primary benefit is that it's easy to comment out any column except the first.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
It's always easy to comment out any column except the first or last. Leading commas make it easy to comment out the last column, trailing commas make it easy to comment out the first.
Personally I don't think that optimization is worth the price. Trailing commas look nicer visually so I prefer them.
> While the comma placement may seem weird
It's not completely unconventional. Haskell is typically styled with that kind of comma usage, too. For example,
[ 1
, 2
]
{ foo = 1
, bar = 2
}
Coincidentally, SQL and Haskell are the only languages I know that use `--` for comments.FWIW, Lua and AppleScript (and HyperTalk!) use(d) `--` as well.
(Edit: I think I misread “know” as “know of”; whoops.)
> I think I misread “know” as “know of”; whoops.
Don't worry about it; you didn't misread. I wasn't aware of AppleScript and HyperTalk, and though I read a bit on Lua some years ago, I either forgot or never realized that it used `--` for comments.