[Animats]

"any programming environment you can never stop someone from iterating by index over a binary searchable tree for a specific element in it."

SQL solved that problem a long time ago. You write SELECT, the query optimizer figures out how, using any available indices.

[gldalmaso]

I think that misses the point. SQL does not prevent a junior dev from selecting many more rows than he needs to and then proceed to iterate over them naively.