Re: Columns without names

"JOG" <jog_at_cs.nott.ac.uk> wrote in message news:1158372047.852132.130270_at_p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com...
> 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?

I think it is possible to have one attribute in the database whose name is {}. {} is certainly distinct from any other name that is not empty. I don't know how useful it would be, since it could only have one domain. Received on Sun Sep 17 2006 - 02:50:25 CEST