cdt glossary TABLE (was: Base Normal Form)

C Date and H Darwen in The Third Manifesto, 1st ed, p135, footnote: "/Relation/ has a precise (and somewhat abstract) definition;   /table/ by contrast, does not." (italics original)

Nevertheless people (and DBMS's, and SQL) *do* use the words as if they were. Here is what we've come to expect what people mean when they use these words.

Note that a representation of a table in memory or on paper will (almost always) introduce an order on the elements. This is similar to how denotations of a set such as {a, b, c} and {c, b, a} also introduce each a different order on the elements of the set.
In the first denotation the order is a < b < c, in the second it is c < b < a. This order, however, is merely an aspect of the representation and not a property of the thing that is represented. In other words, the two different denotations actually represent the same thing. For tables this means that the order in memory of the representation of the body is not really part of the body, or, put in another way, if we change that order in the representation then it would still represent the same body.