On Monday 08 December 2008 22:54:41 Guido van Rossum wrote:
From my experience with SQL, it's nearly as bad as Python in that every single one of the 200+ reserved words in a typical implementation cannot be used as a name in any context without using double quotes.
SQL is a big language; I won't disagree with that! That said, you don't always have to quote names like "end" as I mention below.
While the double-quote escape is handy (especially given there are so many obscure reserved words) this is not exactly what the OP wanted -- they would have to say x."as"('float'), except using some other notation instead of double quotes. Having to escape it completely kills the OP's claim that 'as' is "simplest and most elegant".
You can do what the OP wants, at least in PostgreSQL, which is fairly conformant. As I wrote on comp.lang.python... create table "create" ( "select" varchar ); select "select" from "create"; select "create".select from "create"; (This from a PostgreSQL 8.2 session.) I don't know whether SQL 1992 actually allows dropping the double-quotes for column names, but this is the kind of thing he has in mind. Paul