Re: The IDS, the EDS and the DBMS

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:<fXu_c.31617$3l3.28197_at_attbi_s03>...

> Despite my background as an OO coder, I am convinced
> that the power and generality of the OO model is not
> up to the level of the relational model.

What "the OO model" is?

I hope that you are not talking about the "OO model" as a data management model.

> Although I am generally favorable towards D&D and TTM,
> I don't consider that they've gone far enough. They are absolutely
> correct in identifying the lame type systems of today's RDBMS
> products as being a significant hindrance, but their proposed
> language, while advanced in relational features, completely
> ignores everything else that's happened in the last 30 years
> in programming languages and type theory. It is like a variant
> of Fortran with highly developed relational features.

Some of what happened in the last 30 years was bad, like to bundle types and operators.

My conclusion is that when the OO people and D & D talk about inheritance they are talking about very different things. D & D assume that inheritance is subtyping, but the OO people does not care about subtyping they only want to reuse code.

A subtype has nothing to do with a class derived from the code of another class.

Quoting Bill Clinton: It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. :)

In OO 'is' does not mean 'is'. That's why circles 'are' not ellipses.

In fact we could design a language with the D&D subtyping model and many of the code reuse capabilities of the OO languages.  

> Expected, yes, but are they required? I myself am not
> big on compromise; I want it all. I want the full power
> of the relational model, along with important and/or
> modern language features such as type inference,
> parametric polymorphism, first-class functions, partial
> evaluation, etc.

Tutorial D has type inference and parametric polymorphism.

Regards Received on Sun Sep 05 2004 - 15:11:15 CEST