Re: The horse race

Volker Hetzer <volker.hetzer_at_ieee.org> wrote:

>Given the right attributes you can sort according to all those orders in your
>database.

But the issue is whether even theoretically, can a relation be termed an ordered relation when it supposedly is defined as being unordered, by definition?

At what point does any type of sort create an ordered relation? Or is the very possibility simply defined away? which makes it look more like a wordplay or semantics, by the common sense of the term.

I wonder if the confusion isn't over this idea of transcendence or immanence and internal machine representation. In such confusion it might lead some to insist that there is no such thing as intrinsic order, when in fact what is being manipulated by a database, which is really what this is all about, might become useless chaos if its intrinsic order remains unaccounted. Received on Wed Feb 22 2006 - 08:38:57 CET