Alex Fekken (5/14/2013)
Not sure and can't think of why one would use as "BETWEEN -1 AND -10" with "start" as the higher value in any practical case.
Depends on where you are coming from: my initial thought, when I first encountered 'BETWEEN', was "I can't think why one would use BETWEEN in any practical case.".
BETWEEN suffers from at least two ambiguities until you consult the "official" definition to find out what arbitrary choices have been made to remove them.
The first is the issue in question: it would have made just as much sense, if not more, to make the definition symmetrical with respect to the two bounds. Because [1] it would be more work to write down the alternative expression and [2] the keyword AND in all other contexts implies symmetry of the operands, unlike e.g. 'x BETWEEN a TO b'.
The second ambiguity is whether BETWEEN includes or excludes the bounds. Intuitively I would make the wrong assumption there as well.
So for me it is a bad language feature, well-deserving of at least one Question of the Day.
... even if AND is replaced with TO ... it still works in the same way... and when you know the BETWEEN included the bounds, why you want to use your "intuition" and then make the "wrong assumption"? (I have used this keyword and never thought of going alternate.. and BETWEEN works as it suppose to work)
(my concern is with the start expr with the higher value and then put lower value to the end expr and I don't see any practical case where and how it is used to make the code work...)
ww; Raghu
--
The first and the hardest SQL statement I have wrote- "select * from customers" - and I was happy and felt smart.