Re: General semantics

Mr. Scott wrote:
...
> Contrary to the consensus of the D&D evangelists here on c.d.t., OIDs are
> not always evil. There are instances when their use is clearly indicated.
> It certainly makes more sense to store the OIDs from an established
> application in a relation rather than spend thousands of man-hours rewriting
> the app. Anyone who argues otherwise is a fool and should be ignored.
>
>
>

I believe D&D say an OID is a pointer. If that's what those amount to in the magical OO world, then you are arguing that relations should be allowed to store pointers. This would contradict the Information Principle and I'd say the whole relational idea would start to crumble.

Maybe you mean something else. Eg., I don't think D&D object to a system that saves us effort by generating values so that we don't have to make them up, but those would be generated values, not pointers. I certainly would like that feature when trying to record a third-greatfather about whom I might know only a non-unique surname.

It would be more accurate to distinguish the tag 'D&D' from the 'D or D' writings. When it comes to their perhaps most referenced joint writing, ie., TTM, the smaller part is about relational implementation, not theory per se, then there are optional parts about 'OO' concepts. The smaller part would be even smaller were it not for all the warnings about what not to implement. Received on Sun May 23 2010 - 19:15:36 CEST