Re: repeating groups

This discussion is extremely interesting. It relates to my own area, and I firmly believe it is a promising source of development. Sets and lists (ordered sets) underly almost all of modern mathematics, yet current DB models surely throw only cursory regard to this (and often exaggerate their attempts to do so). Of course sets are viewed by many as a man-made construct that have no identity or tangibility without us. Nevertheless the fact that set theory has become so prolific over the previous century may be for that very reason - they appear to have some connection to our own internal construction of the world around us, and as such are damn useful to analysis of almost everything we interact with or theorize about.

As such, second order logic, despite its detractors, shouldn't be shied away from imo - set intensions can offer what might traditionally be viewed as db-constraints mathematically, and with the pre-establishment of a couple of general predicates, may also offer an interesting type inheritance structure based upon those intensional definitions. Received on Mon Feb 20 2006 - 04:12:02 CET