> In SQL, = means the same as == does in most programming languages Not "most", not by a long shot. Off the top of my head, not Pascal, Fortran, Cobol, Lisp, or APL. Not to mention that most iconic of Unix languages, the Bourne shell. You could be right about "most" languages consciously derived from C, but then that might be tautological: any language using "==" might, by that very choice, be consciously derived from C. SQL was invented at IBM, and some of its conventions are traceable to IBM languages of the era. For example, the use of single quotes to denote string literals, and the practice of escaping an embedded quote by 'doubling ''em up'.