Re: Nearest Common Ancestor Report (XDb1's $1000 Challenge)

> > Among other things, the difference in normalization between the
> > implementations is quite different.
>
> It should not matter HOW my implementation generates the report.

It does matter because a less generic and unnormalized implementation will cause more problems or even fail under a broader scope. For instance when the names of two things are the same.

Another isssue with the provided implementation is that the class hierarchy is not modelled faithfully. A part of the original hierarchy is shown below:

thing
  god
  person
    john
    mary
  dog
    fido ...

In the provided implementation, the class hierarchy is (flat):

thing
  god
  person
  john
  mary
  dog
  fido ...

Thus, if a person is named 'skippy' and a dog is also named 'skippy', and we print a thing's class to distinguish them on the report, XDb1 would print:
  person/skippy
  dog/skippy

whereas the provided implementation would print:   thing/skippy
  thing/skippy Received on Thu May 20 2004 - 14:04:33 CDT