Such a syntax would be very difficult to make stable. In some cases the column order is not well defined, especially with complex JOINs using the "USING" syntax, or in self-JOINs, where the same column name exists in multiple places within the query. In true Relational Theory form, columns are unordered, just as rows are. While the first clause of a SELECT statement defines the column ordering for the output, there shouldn't be strong assumptions about the column ordering at the end of the FROM processing.