Re: The horse race

From: Marshall Spight <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com>
Date: 21 Feb 2006 09:38:17 -0800
Message-ID: <1140543497.762336.18050@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>

Mark Johnson wrote:
>
> But as I understand it, relations are not supposed to be sorted.

Relations have no implicit order. This is part of the definition.

> So I
> wondered that if a relation includes a horse's ranking, as a 'thing'
> intrinsic, that one is trying to say that relations can be sorted?

It depends on what you mean by "sorted." If you mean, can we change the definition of relation to include the idea that it has implicit order, then the answer is "no." If you mean, can we pass the relation to a sort function that will examine the attributes of the relation and return an ***ordered set*** that has the same elements as the original set, then the answer is "yes."

Reviewing the fundamentals of set theory might be in order; this is a very basic question.

Marshall Received on Tue Feb 21 2006 - 11:38:17 CST