Re: The BOOLEAN data type

Paul <paul_at_not.a.chance.ie> wrote in message news:<MPG.18f7b403e8268d469896b5_at_news1.eircom.net>...
> bbadour_at_golden.net says...
>
>
> > > I'm confused here! Why is it bad?
>
> > > I'm working on a project where we store people's gender - what's wrong
> > > with using a boolean for that?
>
>
> > Because gender is neither true nor false.
>
>
> What about a field HasYChromosome - and please don't tell me about
> various chromosomal disorders that can lead to attributes of maleness
> despite having no Y chromosome or vice versa - this has little relevance
> in the real world.
>
>
> > It is male, female, neuter,
> > partially transgendered, gender reassigned male to female, gender reassigned
> > female to male, unknown etc.
>
>
> This is essentially meaningless in the real world - "You've just had a
> baby - boy or girl?" - not "Is it male, female, partially transgendered,
> gender reassigned male to female, gender reassigned female to male,
> unknown etc."
>
>
> Knowing the sex of the person in the case of an app I'm working on at
> the moment is important, since it is potentially necessary for possible
> dormitory sleeping arrangements - i.e. the boys sleep in dorms with
> other boys and vice versa.
>
>
> > I suggest you choose an appropriate domain that represents the values of
> > interest and define the appropriate operations for the domain. The boolean
> > domain has two distinct values neither of which are male or female, and it
> > has operations such as conjunction and implication that have no meaning for
> > gender.
>
>
> What about a table which stores bills? Paid or unpaid - that's a fairly
> simple and important example of a boolean.
>
>

Or, as in the case of a small School project I recently completed, let's say you have a table of product orders and you need to know which one's have been shipped and which one's haven't. That's a boolean value that can't be computed from other data. Received on Tue Apr 08 2003 - 20:48:51 CEST