Re: Terminology question

> Actually, I liked "data source" best of all the terms you proposed. The
> only way in which that term might be misleading
..

Thanks all for the nice discussion.

This was my first post here and I was still not aware of the people featured by this group. I have taken a look at the posts and got some idea ;)

Well I spend around 18 hours a day with debuggers and databases and do not devote much time trying to frame (relatively) known things into definitions. I like more the inverse approach: prefer to have a working experience of things and then, if someone might ask me what is that, I may try to make an effort to capure it into a definition. Usually * a technical definition does not make any sense if you do not already know what we are talking about *

Take for instance all the concept of object oriented programming (inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, interfaces, etc...). There is no way you can get their *real* meaning if you do not apply everyday them in some very large project. You only assume to kno: but probably you dont.

Take for istance the most basic:

 "A logically coherent collection of related real-world data   assembled for a specific purpose."

if I write the names of my friends on a piece of paper, that would fit the above. Bob you would laught at me if I call it a "database".Ah ah. Well I could argue that is in fact a dbms because there is also some service attached provided by myself. Ah ah. And it is probably smarter that any other dbms you could find around, although of limited capacity and speed. Well, I could buy more paper and hire a few slaves... Ah ah

Definitions are an arrival point from certain persons, and a starting point for other persons.

The first often think that the definition is too narrow. The latter often think that it is too generical and could fit many things.

After all a definition is always tautological because based on other definitions. In math it is useful to define some (undefined, but usually intuitive) assioms and the derive everything from that. But in real life we could assume that everything we know is the result of working knowledge, and does not require definition. Like we do not bother to define axiomatic conceps, we could just assume an intuitive comprehension of what we know.

-P Received on Wed Sep 06 2006 - 08:51:19 CEST