It might be even better for the user interface (REPL, GUI, web frontend) to have a nice way to send the command "stop and show current results" like ^C or ^G or a button that sends a signal to the backend. I assume this is only going to be useful in an interactive context, after all.
Yes, that's true. After all, it's the functionality that is important, regardless of the means to achieve it. On the other hand, the fact that it is part of the syntax has other advantages:
- it makes the functionality independent of the querying tool used
- it is immediately understandable, and easy to use
- it can be offered by automatic completion and therefore have a higher discoverability power than a function that would be hidden in the editor
Certainly, but the use case mentioned here is not related to a performance issue. It's more about syntactic sugar when a user writes SQL in interactive mode to explore data.