Re: By The Dawn's Normal Light

"erk" <eric.kaun_at_pnc.com> wrote in message news:1099343285.755011.110400_at_z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> > It makes sense to me that types like video and pictures would be
> black
> > boxes to the "collections engine" but a list of text has a structure
> that
> > the collections engine could accomodate.
>
> Agreed, but why would it? What does making the List type primitive to
> the engine offer; given that Pick has a file, which is a collection of
> <something>, why have another collection type at all?
>
> It just occurred to me that with constraints, a relation can simulate
> any other data type, though they still must be manipulated via
> relational operations.

Yes and it might be the case that the database engine opts to implement everything collection as a relation, however, from a logical perspective, I would like more types of collections than simple relations.

> The constraints, and the "design goal" of a
> relation being a logical predicate, offer a lot of power, and
> "object-like" operations can be nicely derived; I recommend reading up
> on Alloy. I don't know it well enough to give an example off-hand, but
> the site has good documentation and it's eye-opening reading...
> http://web.mit.edu/~rseater/www/tutorial3/alloy-tutorial.html

I'll take a look. --dawn

>
> - erk
Received on Mon Nov 01 2004 - 23:57:36 CET