Scratchpad

_AScratchpad.md

This is where I record odd musings I have without worrying about writing long-form defenses of them.

ListOfThingsToCoatInCopper.md

• Back of Cell Phone (interferes with wireless charging?)
• Mouse
• Door Handles
• Coffee Mug

ProgrammingLanguagesAsInstitutions.md

I was working with a number of queries in SQL Server recently. I was vaguely annoyed by the formatting. It looked like this:

SELECT a
  ,b
  ,c
FROM table

Why on earth would you prepend a line with a comma? Aesthetically, I'd much prefer the same query formatted like this:

SELECT a,
  b,
  c
FROM table

There's literally no runtime difference. So why the former? Fast Commenting! Consider the case in which we want to alter the query to eliminate c from the results. In the former case, we need only comment a single line:

SELECT a
  ,b
  --,c
FROM table

In the latter, however, we need to comment out the c, and also do a little surgery on the prior line:

SELECT a,
  b--,
  --c
FROM table

OK, fair enough to the way we format the query (even if it is unattractive). But why? In this case, there's a specific rule we can trace it back to: SQL Server does not permit trailing commas. This is an invalid query:

SELECT a,
FROM table

If it were valid, then we could adopt the cleaner comma-last syntax without considerations of how to efficiently comment lines.