Re: The Practical Benefits of the Relational Model

>On the search for a single language. This has been the holy grail
>of computing since the 1940s. We are further away than we ever were.
>The reason we can't see it is the same reason that was given for the
>failure to find the holy grail: we are impure.

:-) In a sense this is very true. To find this holy grail the single language would need to be pervasive, so that even our operating systems embodied the same concepts as the language.

Not easy to get to there from here. We are rather locked in. It might be easier than say getting the whole world to drive on the same side of the road, but I'm not sure how much easier.

>Burdening the interface language with becoming the universal programming
>language will simply weigh the language down to the point where it fails
>in its initial mission.

What burdens programming languages is lack of conceptual integrity, not their ambition.

>Having relational capabilities in the programming language. No argument
>there. It would be great to be able to do select, project, join, etc. in
>the programming language. But aside from defining "relations" as
objects
>upon which relational operators can operate, aren't we talking about a
>relatively trivial extension of existing languages?

If it's trivial, why has it not been done? Or has it?

Regards
Paul Vernon
Business Intelligence, IBM Global Services Received on Tue Sep 17 2002 - 18:43:37 CEST