Re: (OT)Dynamic inheritance (was: Object support in the relational model??)

"Dan Muller" <spam_dmuller_not_at_spookydistance.com> wrote in message news:<BtqK8.19936$UT.1308982_at_bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>...
>
> One of the problems with "implementing Tutorial D" is that it is not a
> fully-developed general-purpose language. A fair amount of work would need
> to go into it yet to make it into a scalable general-purpose programming
> language.

        One thing I don't understand: why not leave it as a data sublanguage, and leave computation to better-stabilished languages? I for one am all for functional programming, for example; why force everyone into a COBOL or C# dialect?

> I've got a fair amount of the relational algebra working already -- natural
> joins using operator&&, unions with operator||, etc. -- but I'm not at all
> happy with the type system yet. Because of the nature of relation types, the
> API has to rely entirely on dynamic typing -- I haven't figured out how,
> even with sophisticated template use, I could use static C++ types to
> represent distinct relation types, since relation types are generated by
> relational expressions.

        That's one thing that annoys me. Ideally, we should have The Third Manifesto's type system, and languages should use that. In C#, MS enforces their type system, and that's a unification factor among all languages implemented on top of .Net, but nothing yet compares to TTM's type system.

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