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

On 26 May 2004 10:25:42 -0700, Neo wrote:

>> Note however that things without name tend to be a PITA when
>> you want to do anything useful with it, unless other attributes are stored
>> that can be used to identify exactly which thing one wants to discuss.
>
>XDb1 can accept two things whose attributes do not allow them to be
>distinguished (ie two persons named john). Why? Because such
>situations can come up in the real world.

Yes. And in the real world, extra attributes get added right away to create a way to distinguish them.

My wife started at a new job in March. She is called José. One of the women she supervises is also called José. Everybody at my wife's office now calls my wife "José D" and the other lady "José T".

Why? Because in the real world, there's a NEED to distinguish things from one another, and if they happen to have the same name something else is used to make that possible.

(snip)
>True but XDb1's data/schema does allow each thing to have 0 to many
>names while the provided solution's data/schema does not.

Yeah right.

I tried entering john's nickname. I opened the saved database Ex076.xdb and expanded all nodes in the thing/god/army/john branch. Then, I entered 'john's name is johnnyboy.' This caused a name-less node to appear as a "child" of john. I clicked the blank space after that node twice to enable name change, and suddenly the name "johnnyboy" was there. I clicked somewhere elsse and the name was truncated to "johnnyb". I did the "click twice to change name but don't change name" trick again and now the full nickname was there.

However, john is now no longer john. His name seems to have changed to "john johnnyboy". Nobody calls him that! His mother calls him John, his close friends call him johnnyboy and the paperboy calls him Mr Johnson, but nobody calls him "John Johnnyboy".

Second attempt. Let's say that John is also nicknamed (for whatever strange reason) Luke. I went back to the original Ex076.xdb. This time, I expanded ALL child nodes of thing / god. I entered 'john's name is luke.' and this time, a new node titled 'luke' immediately appeared under john's node. But wait - the new "luke" node can be expanded and shows a color (red) and a follower in the leader relation (fido). Obviously, I did not enter another name, I made some strange relation between john and another person (luke). That was of course never my intention!

Best, Hugo

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