This idea is particularly sticky because it was more or less true 50 years ago, and it's a passable mental model to use when learning sql. But it's an inadequate mental model for building new sql frontends, designing new query languages, or writing tools likes ORMs that abstract over sql. Before we get into that, we first have to figure out what 'syntactic sugar' means. Wikipedia says: Syntactic sugar is usually a shorthand for a common operation that could also be expressed in an alternate, mor...