Re: Newbie question on table design.

"David Cressey" <cressey73_at_verizon.net> writes:
> You are absolutely right. I can back that up from my own experience. At
> about the 1969 time frame, I had been using interactive timesharing systems
> for a while, and I knew how to use the debugger and the text editor
> amazingly well. But my ability to design a piece of software that was
> logically correct (barring minor errors) at the outset was, in retrospect,
> less than it might otherwise have been.
>
> Between 1969 and 1980, due to a series of job changes and outlook changes,
> I migrated from assembler to Pascal. Pascal was the first language that I
> learned thoroughly before writing any programs. And, in the Pascal learning
> materials, there was a great deal about designing a program correctly.
>
> Wirth had the attitude that there was no reason why a carefully written
> program shouldn't compile on the first try. I never got as rigid as that.
> But Pascal ended up being the main reason I never learned the VAX debugger.
> The VAX debugger was, by all accounts, much more powerful than the earlier
> more primitive tools I had used (DDT for example).

re:

http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#2 Newbie question on table design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#7 Newbie question on table design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#8 Newbie question on table design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#9 Newbie question on table design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#11 Newbie question on table design

for other topic drift ... mention that system/r, sql/ds and (mainframe) DB2 was primarily PLS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#12 Newbie question on table design

slight drift with some past comments about PLS in relationship to System/R implementation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007d.html#17 Jim Gray Is Missing

however, i've mentioned also working on a "relational" DBMS implementation for the Los Gatos VLSI tool group (that had some participation from some people in STL). This was relational in the sense that all the relations were directly instantiated ... rather than a data dictionary that applied a uniform table structure. It shared characteristics with System/R that the "relations" were abstracted with indexes under the covers (and not exposed as part of the data).

The tools group had been doing extensive work on various kinds of

languages using Metaware's TWS ... misc. past refs:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#0 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#1 [Lit.] Buffer overruns

and developed a Pascal implementation that was used extensively for numerous tools ... including the (tools group) DBMS implementation ... recent reference:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#61 Fast and Safe C Strings: User friendly C macros to Declare and use C Strings

it was eventually released as vs/pascal language product. Received on Fri May 04 2007 - 17:59:58 CEST