Re: By The Dawn's Normal Light

"Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.comREMOVE> wrote in message news:cleccb$q3d$1_at_news.netins.net...
> "Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message
> news:tCxed.294876$MQ5.202563_at_attbi_s52...
> > "Dawn M. Wolthuis" <dwolt_at_tincat-group.comREMOVE> wrote in message
> news:cldvjl$hj9$1_at_news.netins.net...
> > >
> <snip> We should probably start talking about what the nested
> > relational model would look like, and what operations it
> > would support. I understand academia has been over
> > this ground a lot....
>
> If we think of the type definition including operations and have an
> extensible type system, then perhaps we could start with some generic
> "thing" and call that type Object. Then we could extend that object, add
> some primitive types such as int, double, char, short, boolean, long, and
> float and then provide a standard library that users can extend as needed.

Actually, I'm not sure that it makes sense to mix subtyping into the conversation from first principles. I'm not clear that it's required, although in Java at least, subtyping is very useful. In fact, I'd say we have no immediate evidence that subtyping isn't superfluous in the face of a good nested relational system.

> In fact, I think such systems are already out there. What would we lose if
> we used Java for defining types?

The possibility of doing better?

Marshall Received on Sun Oct 24 2004 - 06:50:57 CEST