Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

"Mikito Harakiri" <mikharakiri_at_iahu.com> wrote in message news:AVUmb.3$uD6.177_at_news.oracle.com...
> "Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message
> news:nkEmb.29665$Tr4.57087_at_attbi_s03...
> > Well, there's a weird thing going on: order encodes information.
> > Now, us relationalists (or whatever you call 'em) explicitly say
> > we don't care about that, and we gain some optimization benefits
> > and some flexibility by doing so. A significant amount, in fact,
> > so that it's easy enough to say "it's worth it."
>
> It's fair to say that relationists don't quite understand what the order
is
> and how to treat it mathematically. The confusion goes back into math
> definition of ordered pair. Kuratovski's definition of ordered pair
>
> (a,b) = {{a},{a,b}}
>
> is very unsatisfactory.
>
> > Because of my exposure to the relational model, I'm used to
> > thinking of data as being exclusively expressed as values or
> > sets. But there's that nagging feeling: there's a whole different
> > *kind* of information besides sets.
>
> Certainly, you may even say that intricacies of the set theory are
> irrelevant to practical mathematition (sounds familiar, huh?). It is often
> claimed that it's the connection of algebra and geometry that is the most
> exciting in math.
>
> > Put another way: a set contains less information than an
> > ordered set with the same elements. That just strikes me
> > as bizarre, and although I think I understand the situation,
> > I certainly don't understand all the implications of it.
> > This different kind of information is truly weird, in
> > that it cannot exist without a set to piggyback on.
> > An ordered empty set contains the same amount
> > of information as the regular empty set. Hmmm,
> > well, maybe it doesn't. See how weird?
>
> I'm not sure if I share your feeling, but relational theory certainly has
> some "uncompleted" flavor.
>
> From practical perspective, I find it odd that one can't describe GUI
> relationally. This is why we still use old procedural languages on client
> side, right?

One can describe anything relationally. What makes you think it impossible to describe a GUI relationally? Received on Mon Oct 27 2003 - 00:21:27 CET