Is this valid SQL syntax? :-)

I’m talking about this:

select-1from from dual;

Looks like invalid, right? Well, let’s run it:

SQL> select-1from from dual;

       ROM
----------
 -1.0E+000

This is because:

1. Oracle doesn’t need whitespace for tokenizing the SQL statement (differences in character classes will do – as I’ve explained here)
2. The first from “keyword” in the above statement is broken down to two tokens as an “F” right after a digit means that the preceding number is a FLOAT (and “D” means DOUBLE) and the tokenizer stops right there, knowing that whatever comes after this character (“ROM”) is a next token, which according to the Oracle SQL syntax rules will be assigned as the output column alias

The following funky-looking SQL statements are also valid:

SQL> select.1e2ffrom dual;

     .1E2F
----------
  1.0E+001

SQL> select.1e2fas"."from dual;

         .
----------
  1.0E+001

In the upper example, the “.1e2f” means number .1 * 10^2 (scientific notation) represented as a FLOAT internally and in the lower one I’ve just added a column alias with “AS” keyword just to make the SQL look a bit crazier.

:-)