Genuinely, I'd love to see this approach be taken: allow for a set of characters to be used as list delimiters. I personally like the set to be comma, semicolon, and newline, but of course this set would need to be varied depending on other syntax (e.g. in SQL, we wouldn't want semicolon to be used for this).

Having newline be a valid list separator is particularly nice because it solves the "trailing comma" and "comma-first" style workarounds in a visually elegant way. The newline already provides a visual separator; we can already tell that we're at the end of most lists by way of having another keyword appear next without needing to rely on a lack of commas, for example:

    select
        id
        name
        email
    from users

Because there's existing implementations that would interpret that as aliasing column names.

``` SELECT Field AS Renamed, OtherField AS AlsoRenamed ```

and

``` SELECT Field Renamed, OtherField AlsoRenamed ```

are semantically equivalent.

Making AS mandatory for naming columns would be an improvement in and of itself.

Yes, but it's also a breaking change to a very large legacy codebase. I can't see it ever happening, sadly.

Because in SQL whitespace is already used for all manner of special syntax.

That said, generating SQL from s-expressions can be a very pleasant experience.