Re: Redundancy and NULLS in Xdb

On Sun, 7 Nov 2004 17:49:06 -0500, "Laconic2" <laconic2_at_comcast.net> wrote:

>For almost a year now, Neo has been "treating" us to presentations on how
>his "experimental database" represents complex data without using any
>redundancy or NULLs at the atomic level.
>
>Of course, he's wrong. The data items like "brown" that he claims are
>"atomic" really aren't atomic at all. Not only can they be broken down
>into characters, but the individual characters can be further decomposed.
>
>The only form of digital data that can't be further decomposed are the raw
>binary digits: zero and one.
>
>What Neo has shown us is syntactic sugar. Once we strip all that sugar
>away, and get down to the real nitty gritty, we'll see that an Xdb
>database is really a bunch of ones and zeroes.
>
>Right away, Neo is in trouble. The ones are all redundant, except for the
>first! They all look identical! A truly non redundant system would have
>only one "one" in it. All the others would be replaced by pointers back to
>the original one. The same treatment would have to be given to the zeroes:
>a truly redundant system would have one one "zero" in it. All the others
>would be replaced by a pointer back to the original zero.
>
>But it doesn't stop there! Not only are the zeroes redundant, but they
>also have NO VALUE! The PHB once pointed this out to Dilbert! What they
>really are, are placeholders indicating where a one might have been written,
>but was not. Functionally, they are NULLS.
>
>So Neo's Xdb. at the truly atomic level, is full of redundancy and NULLS.
>Hence he hasn't even won his own contest!

Please show Neo how you would represent this in RM:

100000000 *isa 10001010101000110
100101101 *isa 10010010
101010101 *isa 10010010010010
111111111 *isa 11111111000

Please explain what RM would do with:

CREATE2 *10100011.10110 = 11101101001
CREATE2 *1111011011.1101101 = 11101101001
CREATE2 *1111011011.110001 = 11101101001
CREATE2 *1111011011.1100100001 = 11101101001
CREATE2 *1111011011.11010101001 = 11101101001
CREATE2 *1111011011.11110001 = 11101101001

And now we can:

(get 11101101001's 1101010100111111000010) SELECT2 %.11101101001 = % Let's see you do THAT in RM!

Lemming

-- 
Curiosity *may* have killed Schrodinger's cat.