Re: Columns without names

JOG wrote:
> 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?

If I were just to read your last paragraph, I would say that the question of what is a legal column name is a merely syntactic question, and we are free to choose whatever rules we care to apply without affecting the underlying semantics. The empty string is a perfectly legal string, and there might be perfectly good reasons for allowing it as a column name. (Or for forbidding it, for that matter; it does raise some modest syntactic issues.)

Whoops, I'm required to go make breakfast now. Part 2 in a while.

Marshall Received on Sat Sep 16 2006 - 17:25:38 CEST