Re: Database vs. DBMS

"Gene Wirchenko" <genew_at_mail.ocis.net> wrote in message news:36ckp0hvul26dupinfjgn6h65rpfl5d58d_at_4ax.com...
> "Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote:
>
> >I just want to go on record as saying that I find the
> >whole pedantic insistence on differentiating between
> >a database and a dbms tiresome and counterproductive.
> >It isn't "precise"; it's ostentatious. Humans are
>
> It is precisely "precise". It is also accurate.

Like honesty, precision for its own sake is no virtue.

Has anyone ever seen an actual case of failure to disambiguate the two terms causing a problem? I haven't. I've never even seen it cause any difficulty in discourse. OTOH, I've seen many, many pointless corrections made that interfered with actual communication.

> Since the English language has a lot of redundancy, one can often
> get away with sloppiness. However, this comes at a terrible price.
> When a situation occurs where the distinction is critical, it likely
> will not get caught since the sloppy user is not in the habit of
> checking for accuracy.

That has not been my experience. In fact, I flat out don't believe in this "terrible price." This is despite the fact that I am someone who takes some care to employ propper punctuation and grammar.

> >People don't confuse classes and objects either,
> >even if their diction would lead you to believe
> >otherwise.
>
> That is not what I saw while I was working on my diploma. OOP
> was very difficult for most of my classmates. Some did not ever get it.

I have it on good authority that some people never understand nested loops; that doesn't mean that nested loops are a big conceptual problem in the programming world.

Marshall Received on Wed Nov 17 2004 - 02:29:33 CET