Re: The term "theory" as in "database theory"

In message <1169879616.314041.298460_at_p10g2000cwp.googlegroups.com>, Marshall <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com> writes

>3 and 4 are best. 5 is close.
>
>2, 6, and 7 are the layman's use of the term, which basically means
>a wild-assed guess.

Even so those guesses are a valid aspect of any forum discussing theories. That is unless you believe that everything has already been invented and the current accepted theory is not capable of further refinement.

>Occam's razor is in the same domain as 1, and doesn't really apply,
>except perhaps as a design principle. I'm not clear why you're
>focusing on an offhand comment of FP's in an old dbazine article.

If you want to exclude the "wild-assed guess" then you pretty much have to exclude Occam's razor too, because that's all it is. Occam's razor has never offered proof of anything, it's a socially acceptable way of introducing an unsupportable hypothesis.

-- 
Bernard Peek
back in search of cognoscenti