Hugo Kornelis (4/19/2010)
Tough question. We can't really look in the minds of the developers who originally wrote the feature, so we can only speculate.
Very true
And frankly, I see little reason to do an INSERT with an IDENTITY, and then first do another INSERT before testing SCOPE_IDENTITY, ...
Yes, it is a strange thing to do in the first place.
Given the similarlty to @@IDENTITY pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, that might very well even be the originally intended behaviour.
Agreed, given that the documentation for @@IDENTITY is quite clear on this it's odd (at the very least) that it's not covered in the SCOPE_IDENTITY docs.