Nemeaux (1/3/2013)

---

Although the overall technical correctness of this article is good there is a glaring error in the narrative. There is no such thing as a "single quote" mark. There is an apostrophe mark and there is a quotation mark. A single quote looks thusly " and a double quote looks this way "". What the article’s author refers to as a "single quote" is in reality an apostrophe mark ' and what is referred to as a "double quote" is actually a quotation mark.

I bring this up because the difference is really quite significant. Calling an apostrophe a "single quote" is, putting it simply, quite wrong. It would be like calling a “V” a single “W” and calling a “W” a “double W”.

When looking up "quotation marks" in the Oxford Online Dictionary, http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/punctuation, I see no punctuation mark labeled as "single quote". Nor is there a mention of a "double quote".

Yes, I'm tilting windmills. But one must try occasionally, mustn't one?

Thanks for the soapbox.

roger.plowman (1/3/2013)

---

This issue is yet another example of why SQL is one of the worst-designed languages of all time from a syntactic POV.

Would it have killed the designers to create two string delimiters that could be interchanged (ala BASIC) and reserved square brackets for field/table delimiting?

And while we're at it to use #'s to delimit dates/times (ala MS Access)?

Oh, and use a dedicated "escape" character instead of doubling the escaped character? Sheesh!

sknox (1/3/2013)

---

So that when you have a string which contains both delimiters as literals, you have double the problem? Syntactically, having two delimiters that mean the same thing is a problem, not a solution.


"ala MS Access" == NO. Besides, there's plenty of good documentation on date formatting in SQL, and simply changing 's to #s wouldn't give you any better conversion rate.


On this one, I agree with you -- in principle at least. From a syntax standpoint, it makes sense to have a specific escape character, like regular expressions do, for example. But what happens when you need to include the escape character as a literal? Double the escaped character, again.

In the case of T-SQL and string literals, the only character which would ever need to be escaped is '. So the options were:

a) create an escape character (let's say \) and then use that character to escape every literal ' and \ (i.e, have possible two escape clauses: \' and \\), or

b) use ' as the escape character for itself and have one possible escape clause ('').

So they again opted for the simpler solution.

Nemeaux (1/3/2013)

---

Although the overall technical correctness of this article is good there is a glaring error in the narrative. There is no such thing as a "single quote" mark. There is an apostrophe mark and there is a quotation mark. A single quote looks thusly " and a double quote looks this way "". What the article’s author refers to as a "single quote" is in reality an apostrophe mark ' and what is referred to as a "double quote" is actually a quotation mark.

I bring this up because the difference is really quite significant. Calling an apostrophe a "single quote" is, putting it simply, quite wrong. It would be like calling a “V” a single “W” and calling a “W” a “double W”.

When looking up "quotation marks" in the Oxford Online Dictionary, http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/punctuation, I see no punctuation mark labeled as "single quote". Nor is there a mention of a "double quote".

Yes, I'm tilting windmills. But one must try occasionally, mustn't one?

Thanks for the soapbox.