Re: Base Normal Form

From: Marshall Spight <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com>
Date: 12 Jul 2005 08:19:09 -0700
Message-ID: <1121181549.042672.249540@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>

dawn wrote:
> [a lot of stuff]

Dawn,

Uh, wow.

I don't *want* to ditch the word relation; I don't have another word that comes close. "Function" doesn't cut it. I also don't see any particular conflict or even a difference between mathematics and computer science; I consider CS to be a branch of math, with some particular areas of emphasis, such as how much work calculating a particular function is.

And what's wrong with "a subset of the product of sets?" That's not all that complicated. It's no more complicated than "a mapping from one set to another."

> > It doesn't have to be required, it usually follows from the fact that
> > the relation is a set.
>
> You lost me here. How do you define a candidate key in mathematics so
> that every set must have one?

A "set" is a collection of *unique* members. Because of that word "unique" there has to be a candidate key.

Marshall Received on Tue Jul 12 2005 - 10:19:09 CDT