Re: General semantics

paul c wrote:

>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 know the term OID only from some database literature, in which it is used for such generated values. In OO programming, a distinction can be made between pointers, which are addresses in memory and which can be meaningfully added to, and references, which are not and on which the only meaningful operation is equality comparison. References are in between pointers and OIDs.

-- 
Reinier