Re: 1 NF

Walt wrote:
>> ...
>>Codd being the terse guy he was, I find it easy to fall into the trap of
>> reacting to his words as if he meant them to be all-inclusive. For
>>example in the 1970 paper he said "A relation whose domains are all
>>simple can be represented in storage by a two-dimensional
>>column-homogeneous array of the kind discussed above." I don't think
>>this means that a relation is necessarily two-dimensional.
>> ...

> 
> ...
> I find Codd to be refreshingly concise, rather than terse.  In the above
> quote is is NOT asserting that a relation "is two-dimensional".  
> ...

As I mentioned. The quote was not what I wanted to discuss, maybe I should have mentioned the sentence where he says "roughly analogous" to show that he didn't spend much time explaining why he wasn't interested in certain topics. I'm not criticizing him for that, I heard many times how many knocks he took for his ideas, even in the early days I wouldn't have faulted him for having limited patience on occasion, dispensing out of hand with various suggestions that came his way.

> The tone is so different from what one encounters here in c.d.t.

Well, the paper is certainly different from many. I'm still struck by the insight, but have never paid much attention to tones.

p Received on Mon Mar 05 2007 - 04:02:40 CET