Re: The BOOLEAN data type

>> I do agree that storing a ship_date (shipping date) makes data more
meaningful and is a good thing in 91,7%, or so, cases. <<

Accounting will not work without it! This example is a 100% requirement.

>> However the principle is not ok ... If my model only cares about
Female property for an entity, and if this property has domain (True, False) in my model's semantics ... <<

This is a bad data model; clearly "female" is a value of an attribute; the domain is "gender". Why do you want to find ways to do bad data models? N. Wirth said it very nicely: "A good language should make good programming easier and bad programming harder".

>> And sure - one can always store boolean values as expression: (some
property = some value), but isn't this complexity overhead in general? <<

That is not complexity; that is reality <g>! A Boolean is too general to carry much meaning. Received on Wed Apr 09 2003 - 18:29:15 CEST