Columns without names

Faced with a data collection something like: Tom is aged 20, Dick is aged 30 and Harry is aged 40

I find it apt to view a relation predicate for them as:
"There is a people_relationship where name is X and age is Y"
(Initially this was to stop any urge to think in terms of entities as opposed to assertions, and even though this is now unnecessary the process has stuck)

However it struck me that this process may be reversed. Not very interesting, until I started considering domain-defining statements such as:

"There is a number, 7." or "There is a letter, b."

These are potentially different statements to those such as "There is a person, Sally" because the latter is stating "There is a person where name:Sally". The values held in the former assertions have no discernable attribute name - rather than a tuple such as { (name:Sally), (age:28)} I just have { (7) } or { (b) }.

So I would like to offer for discussion the concept of whether it is possible to have a relation with a single column /but no column name/. Granted it is kooky, but is there anything theoretically against this principle, and if not, could it be of value? Received on Fri Sep 15 2006 - 21:00:47 CDT