Benefits Of Using SQL Ordinal Position Notation?

Question

Background Information

Ordinal position notation, AKA ordinals, is column shorthand based on the column order in the list of columns in the SELECT cla

Answer 1

I have a query generating algorithm - the SQL is auto generated. Using the ordinal means that I can refer to the generated field without having to fetch the field name again. The user can refer to the field name in a table by selecting it from a list on the screen. As long as I make the list correspond with the sql, I would never need to know field names, if the SELECT items were ordinal, too.

Memory says this used to be in the SQL standard in the late 1970's