Re: attribute name conflicts

Bob Badour wrote:
> paul c wrote:
> ...
> Did you perhaps mistype and mean: "Does it ever make sense within a
> given application (as opposed to within a given db) to have two
> different *attributes with identical names* that identify different
> types/domains?"
>
> If so, I would say: Yes, absolutely. While I would expect the much more
> common case is for similarly named attributes to have the same type, I
> can imagine all sorts of cases where one might use the same name for
> different types of things.
>
> Capacity might mean a volume in one case, a weight in another case and
> stored energy in a third case.

Thanks, yes I did mis-type and meant it the way you put it.

Regarding "capacity", I think I'd prefer for an app to use the three different names: "volume", "weight" and "energy". My main reason (psychological) would be that I find it helpful to have as much transparency as possible (as one might gather from reading my frequent mis-typings) but a technical reason might be that then I wouldn't need to deal with "exceptions" (I presume that an expression like "A JOIN B" where A and B use the "capacity" attribute name for different types would, in the purest sense, be considered not well-formed, ie., it would not be strictly logical to give a result such as "empty" or "false" for such an expresssion.)

p Received on Wed Jun 27 2007 - 11:56:59 CDT