Re: By The Dawn's Normal Light

> It makes sense to me that types like video and pictures would be
black
> boxes to the "collections engine" but a list of text has a structure
that
> the collections engine could accomodate.

Agreed, but why would it? What does making the List type primitive to the engine offer; given that Pick has a file, which is a collection of <something>, why have another collection type at all?

It just occurred to me that with constraints, a relation can simulate any other data type, though they still must be manipulated via relational operations. The constraints, and the "design goal" of a relation being a logical predicate, offer a lot of power, and "object-like" operations can be nicely derived; I recommend reading up on Alloy. I don't know it well enough to give an example off-hand, but the site has good documentation and it's eye-opening reading... http://web.mit.edu/~rseater/www/tutorial3/alloy-tutorial.html

• erk