Re: Grammatical Inconsistencies

From: James L. Ryan <taliesinsoft_at_mac.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 18:23:50 GMT
Message-ID: <0001HW.BCAAD4E60009C9DAF03055B0@news.prodigy.net>

On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 09:58:23 -0500, Alfredo Novoa wrote (in article <40853a00.16469602_at_news.wanadoo.es>):

> On Mon, 19 Apr 2004 23:14:04 GMT, James L. Ryan <taliesinsoft_at_mac.com>
> wrote:
>

>> Does anyone else find themselves somewhat uncomfortable that, in the 
>> context of relational databases, we say such as "Join" and "Project" 

>
> We say "join" and "projection"
>

>> , but we also say such as "Intersection" and "Union"? Why not "Junction" 
>> and "Projection" 

>
> "Join" can be used as a noun, then it is a synonym of "junction", but
> "join" is shorter.

Alfredo,

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

My guideline here is C. J. Date's "An Introduction to Database Systems, 7th Edition." On page 156 he states, "We consider the operators in the sequence union, intersection, difference, product, restrict, project, join, and divide..." (In the book the operator names are italicized .) I consider the first four of these to be expressed as nouns and the remaining four as verbs. This is the "grammatical inconsistency" to which I was alluding in my originating note in this threadlet.

Jim

• James L. Ryan -- TaliesinSoft

Received on Tue Apr 20 2004 - 13:23:50 CDT