Re: Date's First Great Blunder

From: Dawn M. Wolthuis <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 11:43:11 -0500
Message-ID: <c5me33$24v$1@news.netins.net>

"Eric Kaun" <ekaun_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:%syfc.637$Gl7.141_at_newssvr15.news.prodigy.com...
> "Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com> wrote in message
> news:c5k8mo$umd$1_at_news.netins.net...
> > "Eric Kaun" <ekaun_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > news:xZgfc.268$Ha4.262_at_newssvr16.news.prodigy.com...
> > > "Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.com> wrote in message
> > > news:c5jopp$hdq$1_at_news.netins.net...
<snip>
> > What gives "declarative" a description of metadata that OO or functional
> or
> > procedural or whatever other languages would not be able to
laim? --dawn

>

> With OO and procedural, the metadata must be separately maintained or
> laboriously derived from the code - not an easy process. Functional is a
> different matter I lack the expertise to discuss much, but it's also
> declarative in that lazy vs. strict implementations can decide on the
order
> of evaluation of expressions (unlike procedural). With "declarative"
> (correctly placed in quotes), what you declare is the "metadata" (although
> we're not really talking about data here). It's just executable (e.g. a
> higher level of abstraction).

>

> Keep in mind that OO is simply procedural with some packaging (although I
> don't know about the inclusion of objects in Lisp and other non-procedural
> languages).

And isn't declarative just specifying the parms for some proprietary database's procedural code to apply? I do think that different languages have different advantages and disadvantages, so I'm not language-agnostic, but I don't see anything decidedly different whether I spec constraints in one language or another. If one is metadata, so is the other.

And for software developers who are writing database-independent code, the constraints often need to be pushed to the underlying databases from some other repository with some other language (often proprietary to the software developer). So a rules database for all constraints makes sense. Then if a "service" is able to maintain the data and apply these rules, then using the DBMS for storing and managing such constraints seems like unnecessary double work (sorry for going off on this tangent) cheers! --dawn Received on Thu Apr 15 2004 - 11:43:11 CDT