ALT Literate programming is an approach to programming introduced by Donald Knuth that, among other ideas, aims to arrange source code in order of human logic so that it can be understood by reading it like a novel: from the beginning to the end. SQL works in the opposite way: due to the nesting of subqueries we must find and understand the innermost query and then start working from inside out. Not even well-chosen names can improve the recursive reading process notably because names follow the subqueries in SQL. Even the order of clauses in the simplest query has a forward dependency: the meaning of the select clause depends on the from clause. That actually poses an unsolvable problem for development tools: when typing select, it is not yet know which tables are accessed and it is therefore also unknown which columns are visible. Without from no sensible code completion for select. SQL:1999 introduced an alternative to the nesting at least: the with clause.