whois syntax

Sun Oct 21 01:01:05 UTC 2001

[ On Saturday, October 20, 2001 at 16:15:48 (-0700), Vadim Antonov wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: whois syntax
>
> A well-defined and widely implemented query language to large volumes of
> data organized into tables does, in fact, exist.
> 
> It is called SQL.
> 
> I guess all that whois silliness is an acute case of NIH syndrome.

I wouldn't think so -- NICNAME/WHOIS came long before SQL was popular
enough to depend upon for such a simple application.  SQL wasn't
proposed as a standard until 1989 (with the beginnings of the process
starting in 1986).  RFC 812 was published in 1982.  (Yes there was
something very much resembling SQL published by IBM in 1976, but I
believe it was "just" a research project at the time.)

NICNAME/WHOIS was also initially designed to solve a problem that was at
the time so much infinitely simpler than anything anyone sane would ever
choose SQL for, even today.

SQL was not without competitors in the early days too!  If the Internet
had started on Multics, the data would likely have been stored in MRDS
and its query language might have been available to WHOIS clients in
that scenario.  If the SRI-NIC machines were unix-only at the time the
query language might have been regular expressions, with the search
engine implemented as a wrapper around grep!

As if that's all not reason enough, it's also important to remember that
SQL was a result of research at, and initially a product of, IBM (though
Oracle claims to have introduced the first commercially available
implementation); and undoubtably that just didn't sit well with the
early Internet pioneers who were working on primarily DEC equipment
(though I can't say that's related to the decisions of the SRI-NIC
implementors or not, except perhaps by chance).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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