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A comment on Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel". Parent comment

Re:Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel" by lloydatkinson on Monday February 23, 2026 @11:08AM (#47124241)
Does it really help to call SQL a graph?
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Re:Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel" by data_ders on Monday February 23, 2026 @11:11AM (#47124293)
right? like it's a graph and a relational model query and a pipeline and a language and an abstract syntax tree and declarative logical plan
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Re:Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel" by thesz on Monday February 23, 2026 @01:04PM (#47126122)
It does. Just like any other programming language.
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Re:Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel" by lloydatkinson on Monday February 23, 2026 @02:11PM (#47127214)
May as well call everything a graph at that point; meaningless.
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Re:Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel" by thesz on Monday February 23, 2026 @05:37PM (#47129992) 

  > meaningless.
No.

You present "programs are graphs" as trivial truth. True trivial truths are, as you pointed out, meaningless. But you leave out degree of applicability - information in the dependence graph differs between programming languages.

Dependencies form a graph, and analyses needed to optimize execution of the program graph differ wildly between languages. Look at ะก++ aliasing rules and C's "restrict" keyword.

One can't escape the dependence graph. But one can execute dependence graph better or worse, depending (pun intended) on the programming language.

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