Re: What databases have taught me

erk wrote:
> Marshall wrote:
>

>>No disagreement here. However my personal feeling is that most
>>or all of the functional idioms, and also the Python idioms, including
>>list comprehensions (which was borrowed from Haskell if I'm not
>>mistaken) actually have better counterparts in the relational algebra.
>>I say this not intending to disparage either FP or Python.

>>Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by semantic correctness.
>>Certainly structural typing introduces the possiblility of "accidental"
>>type compatibility, but I consider this a minor problem. (I never
>>hear SML programmers complain about it, for example.)

Then just try some of them !-)

>

>>A fair point. I remain sceptical about multimethods in particular, but
>>I agree in general. (I wonder: if a language lacks subtyping, and
>>has overloading, is there anything left for multimethods to do? Hmmm.)

Don't know for sure if it's the "only useful" feature of OO, but that's definitively something that really helps IME. And when one reads the description (and implementation details, my my my) of the "visitor pattern", the fact that there's a problem with how polymorphism works in most OOPLs is quite obvious indeed !-)

> Predicate-based dispatch (aka pattern matching?)
> is, to me, the logical
> extension of the concept.

I have too few working experience with pattern matching [1] to tell if it's really the same thing, but what I was talking about is boolean expressions on the parameters of the method. If that's not the appropriate terminology, feel free to suggest a better one.

[1] I've mostly seen this in OCaml, and IIRC in Haskell, but never did more than toying with both languages.

-- 
bruno desthuilliers
python -c "print '_at_'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for
p in 'onurb_at_xiludom.gro'.split('@')])"