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> New SQL queries with trailing commas will NOT run fine on engines that don't support trailing commas; this is not a backwards-compatible change.

But they never ran fine on engines that didn't support trailing commas in the first place :/

What you're calling "forwards compatible" is what I call "backwards compatible". Frankly, I suspect most people expect "backwards compatible" stuff to work like this.

Is this distinction useful in any way?

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I think the confusion may be whether you're talking about the queries or the engine. I think this change to the engine/parser would be backwards compatible because old queries will still work on the new engine. A change to the queries in a codebase to include trailing commas would not be backwards compatible because it won't work on older parsers. It seems clear to me that the change discussed here is the engine, hence it should properly be characterized as "backwards compatible".

No. It is not. Whomever brought it up was not helping.

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