[coverup]

There are parts of SQL that are crufty by that definition. For example, COMMIT; and COMMIT WORK; are two different statements that do the exact same thing according to the SQL standard.

Perhaps trivial cruft but cruft nonetheless.

[JohnBooty]

I personally wouldn't say that example fits the "getting in the way" part of the definition.

As a user, I've been using SQL for many years and it's never been in the way. It's really just a syntactic alias, so I can't imagine it really impedes the work of the folks maintaining RDBMS's under the hood.

But, I wouldn't argue either. Like you say... I suppose that, however tiny, the burden is non-zero! =)