Re: Unknown SQL

In article <huVR6.773$P22.188159035_at_radon.golden.net>, Bob Badour says...
>
>>I would. Indeed, given an complex UI appication, why can't I ask to find
 all the
>>combobox widgets with a country list easily? We shipped this monster
 application
>>last month and customer wants to update country lists everywhere changing
 the
>>"All" option to blank entry.
>
>I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Are you saying youwould
>like a text editor with the power of SQL for making the changes youneed to
>make to your program? It seems to me that "grep" and "sed" have that kind
 of
>power.

Better example would be a customer who wants to customise my application. Indeed, every merchant on the web wants different look and feel. In ideal world they buy ecommerce application and then do something like:

update ui_tables

    set row.color = 'blue'
    where row.number is even

Well, you clearly could see some my confusion in the above code, as I don't have clear relational UI concept yet, but hope you've got the idea.

I know, those html/xml stylesheets exist, but we are not talking COBOL here. Ad hoc approaches like html stylesheets, are simply not flexible enough, for example row binding is simply out of html stylesheet properties list. And I'm not xml stylesheet programmer either:-)

>>No matter now badly my application is written, the request is so
 simple so
 that
>>it could be easily formulated in SQL. Some people like Peter Douglass
 from
>>comp.object already expressed an idea of having general purpose
 relational
>>engine within programming environment. Until then, however, the best Ican
 do is
>>to navigate ala STL in 3GL language.
>
>
>Or are you saying you would like a programming language with the
 functional
>and declarative expressibility of a relational database language? I would
>too.
>
>I would also like one of those that is well integrated with my DBMS,but I
>still would not confuse the programming language with the DBMS. I would
 

>still let the DBMS manage my data and would write my applications in the
>programming language.

You also want to raise abstraction above 3GL languages, right? Then, why are you trying to put arbitrary boundary where the scope of relational engine ends? Or you don't think it's possible? But, wait, we already have poor man declarative programming like functional programming or STL and DBC in 3GL. Who might envision anything as elegant as like STL was even possible for goofy C++?

BTW, one quote I found relevant to the flame war:

>>>> begin

The key to STL is the notion of iterators, which are generalized pointers that provide a glue for connecting algorithms and data structures. STL is indeed retrograde in its disregard of the current academic dogma suggesting that pointers are evil. Instead of hiding pointers behind value semantics, it makes them the corner-stone of the design. The decision to bring pointers back into the realm of respectability was based on a simple fact: Most things in programming resemble pointers in that they identify a location of data. For instance, Internet addresses, SCSI addresses, and file descriptors all function as pointers

<<<< end Received on Sun Jul 22 2001 - 01:29:09 CEST