Re: Constraints and Functional Dependencies

Marshall wrote:
...
> The problem that primes solve is a fundamental one, though.
> There are other ways to solve it, but the problem itself derives
> directly from the system having named attributes and needing
> to refer to more than one instance of an attribute in a single
> constraint. Once you have both of those, you cannot escape
> needing to have multiple names for the same thing.
> ...

Multiple names have always been hard for me to deal with, there could be several reasons but I'd say for me the reasons are psychological which makes them a practical problem in my case. Apart from attributes, using one name for several relations has been even harder, ie., mutable variables. Not sure, but the first time I saw prime notation might have been in grade school when we were introduced to algebra. I still want to write programs that way.

p Received on Mon Feb 26 2007 - 15:31:45 CET