Re: Operationalize orthogonality

Indeed. Once you can represent integers, you can represent character codes, so you can represent strings. Defining the arithmetic operators is left as an exercise for the reader :)

No-one in their right mind would actually use a system like this in reality of course; but this is the absolute ground zero of relational - everything else can be defined in terms of relations (and their operators), booleans (and their operators) and a mechanism for defining new types and operators based on those. (In much the same way that all functional languages can be reduced to the lambda calculus, or even further to the SKI combinators.)

• Tony