Re: Idempotence and "Replication Insensitivity" are equivalent ?

From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:13:21 GMT
Message-ID: <BeTRg.38755$9u.333360@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>

Marshall wrote:

> Bob Badour wrote:
>

>>If an attribute has no name, how are we to refer to it?

>
> Do you know the term a "small matter of engineering?" Well,
> this is a "small matter of syntax." :-)
>
> I can think of a few approaches.
>
> The first and most comprehensive would be a quoting
> mechanism for identifiers, such as Haskell uses. This would
> allow one to, for example, have identifier names with spaces,
> or empty identifiers, or other otherwise-hard-to-parse
> identifiers. This would also insulate one from differences
> in legal identifiers as one crossed language boundaries.

A name is a name. I don't see how what I said precludes using spaces in names.

> Another approach would be the use of syntactic rules
> that would allow one to simply omit the name. For
> example, if name declaration was always of the
> form "name:type" then the colon could be used as
> the definitive indication of a declaration, and the name
> could simply be optional.

But that doesn't solve the problem of how to refer to the thing with no name.

> Still another shortcut would be the ability to omit the
> name when referring to relations with an unnamed
> attribute:
>
> update Table 5 where id = 11; -- sets the unnamed attribute

Sets what unnamed attribute to what value? If we can have one unnamed attribute, why not two?

> Just some ideas. Whether these are good ideas or
> not depends on the entirety of the laguage design.

I think you missed my point entirely. Received on Mon Sep 25 2006 - 11:13:21 CDT