Jim Starkey wrote:

> Personally, I haven't seen substantial case for ranges within an IN
> LIST. Is it intended only as syntactic sugar, does it allow a user to
> do something he or she otherwise couldn't do, or is a convenience construct?
>

As said, there are others ways to handle it, but:
1) generating different statements as you said
2) inserting in a temp-table and the selecting or joining with the table

> Once again, this is an example of solution presented without a problem.
> If we knew what problem this statement was intended to solve, it would
> be a great deal easier to evaluate it.
>
> Could we go back to the beginning with a clear statement of a system
> requirement?
>

I said... you that never understand things and go with this phrase...

It's dependent from the user...

Right now, I'm writing a IMAP server.

The user is working in his email client, then he decides to select some
messages.
He selected all messages from 2006-01-01 to 2006-01-31 and select
another message from 2006-07-01 and mark as read.

The email client send to the server a list of message ids:
10000:11000,13000

10000 is id of message from 2006-01-01
11000 is id of message from 2006-01-31
13000 id id of message from 2006-07-01

Then now I know you will say that I'm trying to put in the database
something that belongs to a IMAP server...

But just think... This is a case use of well written applications that
allows the user to filter things based on his need.

I had to propose this much time before (even before Dmitry created
LIST), but was without patience to heard "example of solution presented
without a problem". :-)


Adriano