Re: Lucid statement of the MV vs RM position?

Jay Dee wrote:
> Christopher Browne wrote:
> > There is a conspicuous disconnect from Darwen/Date, there, in that
> > they trumpet loudly about strong data typing, whilst Prolog tends to
> > be nearly type-free. Mind you, I'm conflating representation and
> > model there, a bit...

Prolog can hardly be held up either as a model declarative language or as a decent software engineering tool.

> If languages are arranged along a continuum extending
> from "machine oriented" to "problem oriented," we should
> have little trouble recognizing that those on the machine
> oriented end have to be strongly typed and that those types
> must directly correlate to the hardware.

That's completely the wrong way around: to the hardware, it's pretty much all just bit patterns. When writing applications, I want a strong, expressive, statically typed language to detect as many bugs in my code as possible *before* it ever gets to run.

(In my experience, when people complain about the discipline imposed by a strong, static type system, they are really complaining about the compiler refusing to generate a binary for a provably broken program.)

That said, the only operations data types in an RDBMS need to support are equality, comparison, and (maybe) hashing.

But all this is getting off topic.

• Ralph