Is there a technical syntax for CQL or only the English-like style?
Every CQL example I find looks like user's score is greater than 90. Reading that in a code review diff is painful, apostrophes and prose where I expect operators. Is the English style the only option, or is there a normal syntax with comparison operators? Also curious whether variables exist or if every value has to be inlined into the expression.
2 answers
There are three interchangeable styles: natural, technical, and mixed. Your example in technical form is just
user.score > 90and you can mix freely within one query, so a natural condition from a marketer and your operator-style additions coexist fine.
Variables exist too:
let rocket = "x", speed = 28000;and & concatenates strings. Comments work with //, #, or /* */, which helps a lot in longer audience definitions that someone else has to maintain.
One detail to remember: keywords are case-insensitive but string literals are not, so the style you pick has no effect on matching, only readability.
Landing here from a search, one more note for the operator-preferring crowd: the mixed style is genuinely per-clause, so
user.score > 90 and user's interests contains either ["marketing", "sales"]parses fine as a single query. We keep the numeric comparisons technical and leave the behavioral checks like user is returning in natural form, since there is no operator equivalent for those anyway. Also worth remembering that undefined variables evaluate to false by design, so a technical user.plan is "pro" quietly returns false rather than erroring if that attribute was never set.
We standardized on technical style for anything that lives in the repo and natural style for audiences the marketing team edits in the dashboard. Same language, evaluated the same way (the engine targets under 20ms per evaluation), so it is purely a convention question. Diffs got a lot more reviewable after we switched, so I sympathize with the apostrophe fatigue.