Re: L

Cimode wrote:
> paul,
>
> Do me a favor...Stop responding to dawn. She is a lost cause.

Come on, Cimode. I tried very hard to figure out how to speak your language and I provided my definitions to that end. If you are not willing to do the same, you can simply cut out. I am not a relational theorist, but I am not at all a "lost cause" and would appreciate it if you do not use this mean-spirited strategy to cut me out of further conversations.

I'm sorry that we were never able to align our different understandings. Fortunately Hugo clued me in to the fact that even though I repeatedly said that I was not referring to an SQL NULL, you were defining NULL exclusively in those terms. I hope that you now understand that NULL is around in many contexts and its use certainly predates and is not tied to SQL or relational theory. There are two questions here. First, given the situation that we, as an industry, are in with the SQL NULL, how best can we handle it? Second, where do we, as an industry, want to be related to NULL handling? If the answer to the last question is that we head back to NULL handled using 2VL as the logical equivalent to the empty set, then we have another question of how we get there from here.

I hope you can see that I have a legitimate interest in this topic and a legitimate angle on it. If I am not yet speaking your language, I try hard to do 100% of the move from my terminology to that of others, but sometimes I miss on that, so if you can come 10% of the way and attempt to understand my terms, particularly when I provide definitions, then I think we could converse. But I will certainly agree that our first attempt to chat has not been a success. Ah well. --dawn Received on Tue Oct 10 2006 - 16:24:17 CEST