Re: Examples of SQL anomalies?
From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:14:04 -0300
Message-ID: <486cecc0$0$4045$9a566e8b_at_news.aliant.net>
>
>
> I don't entirely agree.
>
> Certainly for mathematical integers, there is no largest representable
> element. In more practical terms, one can imagine an "arbitrary"
> precision integer, which starts with a 32 bit length value followed
> by that many 32 bit quantities of bits. Although one *could*,
> on attempting to evaluation MIN of an empty set/bag, return
> the smallest representable number,
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:14:04 -0300
Message-ID: <486cecc0$0$4045$9a566e8b_at_news.aliant.net>
Marshall wrote:
> On Jul 3, 7:19 am, Bob Badour <bbad..._at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>>David Cressey wrote: >> >> >>>>MIN, MAX and AVG are meaningless when applied to an empty bag, but it seems >> >>Bullshit! The identity element for min is the largest representable >>value. The identity element for max is the smallest representable element.
>
>
> I don't entirely agree.
>
> Certainly for mathematical integers, there is no largest representable
> element. In more practical terms, one can imagine an "arbitrary"
> precision integer, which starts with a 32 bit length value followed
> by that many 32 bit quantities of bits. Although one *could*,
> on attempting to evaluation MIN of an empty set/bag, return
> the smallest representable number,
That would be largest not smallest.
it's not clear that allocating
> the 16 gigabytes of RAM that are necessary to do so is a good
> idea.
>
> For fixed-size integer values, there are no implementation
> difficulties.
> However, I'm not sure that semantically, this is entirely what we
> want, even though there is the very strong argument that the
> smallest int is the identity for the operation.
Largest int is the identity for MIN. Received on Thu Jul 03 2008 - 17:14:04 CEST