Re: RM and abstract syntax trees

David Cressey wrote:
...
> If you need the concept of arbitrary meaningless identifier in order to make
> a point about how RM represents trees, go ahead. Just don't call them
> "pointers" and don't assert that they are the quivalent of pointers when
> they are not.
>>

Heh, "arbitrary meaningless identifier", somebody's liable to make an acronym out of that. I'd rather call it a "made-up" name that stands for a place-holder for a variable set of values that are also made-up. In fact, I think all attributes and the values they stand for are made-up, not just these "AMI's", so db "meaning" is made-up too. Maybe more importantly, even if those identifiers might be thought of as pointers by some programmers, I'd say when talking about db's it is more fruitful to think of them as variables, so we can mentally connect a db with its predicates. Received on Wed Oct 31 2007 - 16:10:10 CET