Any thoughts on all that?

Adding extra functionality doesn't necessarily come at the expense of previous ways of doing things. I cannot think of anything I wrote in SQL 20 years ago that would not work now subject to being tailored to the RDBMS in use. Although, like LanX I'd need some examples to be able to properly comment.

Compactness of code seems to me to be unimportant relative to clarity

I don't universally agree.
If it is a SQL query for a non-techie manager then sure, clarity is the priority. But the same isn't true for a query that is black boxed in a piece of code. Provided the creator and maintainers of that query understand it, nobody else need care about its clarity. Performance is probably the greatest concern followed by compactness.

In reply to Re: Have SQL standards gone too far? by Bod
in thread [OT] Reflecting on SQL. Meditating on Perl. Do languages meet requirements of Agile? by betmatt

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