Not so long ago I used Common Table Expressions for Fibonacci Numbers calculation.
Today I had a conversation with one client about SQL in general and about PosgreSQL dialect in particular. We talked about SQL’s Turing completeness also. Well my opponent is sure that SQL (Postgres dialect either) is not Turing Complete. But I know for sure that if SQL supports CTE it is Turing Complete. Well, I’m sure about it because some time ago at Oscon 2009 David Fetter said so. And my confidence in this man is boundless. 
Anyway, my client proposed to implement Factorial calculation on a pure SQL. I choose Postgres dialect. He agreed.
That was his first mistake! He didn’t know that Postgres has built in “!” and “!!” operators for this purpose.
But to be more convincing, I have wrote this code:
WITH RECURSIVE fact(i, f) AS (
VALUES (2, 1)
UNION ALL
SELECT i + 1, i * f FROM fact
)
SELECT f FROM fact LIMIT 10;
|
Nerd.
Well done Pavel! You even did it tail-recursive
Thanks Gianni. Good to know this fact!