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

> XDb1's parser will gladly accept ages of 7, "over the top", "slightly
> older than I am" or even "I think therefore I am" without bothering to
> check if it has any overloaded operators that are able to do anything
> useful with that data.

It is true that at the db engine level, it will accept any of the above. The burden falls upon the user to further classify 7 as an integer, thirty as a word, over-the-hill as an expression. The user may take on the burden of creating an operation valid on instances of the word class that attempts to convert it to a numerical value, which can then be used to compare thirty to 7. In addition, each thing can have properties (even if the thing itself is a property or value). In the case of over-the-hill, it may have properties such as lowerLimit and upperLimit which could help to make comparisons with 7.

Things in XDb1 can already inherit properties from their classes. Although, it hasn't been implemented, I can envision things inheriting functions from their classes also. Thus, imagine, user creates function ConvertToNumber() and associates it with the word class. Now user create an instance of word named "thirty". Then thirty.ConvertToNumber() would return 30. Received on Wed May 26 2004 - 03:22:10 CEST