Re: The Practical Benefits of the Relational Model

Peter Koch Larsen wrote:
>
> But you _are_ arguing against existing languages and you do so in
> order to promote your future high-level language.

        It is not future, it is present. It does exist and can be tested and kicked around, both as a language definition (D4) and its implementation (Dataphor DAE).

>>>The hypothetical language D does support multimethods

        BTW, it just struck me that while D isn't a language, but a class of languages, yet Tutorial D isn't hypothetical, it just was never implemented.

> I do have to say that i disagree. While there may be
> many fuzzy Object-O books around, the same can be said of the
> relational ditto.

        But then they are just plain bad database books, and not only due to fuzzying the RM.

        While the problem with OO fuzziness is that there is no overarching, fundamental concepts, just generalizations taken from specific implementations, and even so eminently fuzzy, complex, and mutually contradictory. So your next phrase is a bug, not a feature:

> And as soon as you turn to concrete implementations
> such as C++, you can find very concise definitions of a model.

> But the D language JOIN uses the names of the columns to derive a
> JOIN. Thus foreign keys are not in any way taken into consideration.

        Hm, FKs are integrity constraints. For a natural JOIN it suffices to have common domains. So what's the problem?

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