Re: the distinction between data and intelligence

"Jan Hidders" <jan.hidders_at_REMOVETHIS.pandora.be> wrote in message news:_3lqe.115945$Gv2.6823038_at_phobos.telenet-ops.be...
> mountain man wrote:
>>
>> Otherwise, how would you define the distinction
>> between data and intelligence (for the purposes
>> of database theory only budding philosophers!)?
>
> How about calling code stored as data in the database simply "code stored
> as data in the database"? :-)

In the light of things, probably not a bad idea after all! Many thanks!

>> Or, is such a distinction of little consequence?
>
> Distinguishing normal data from code that is stored in the DBMS is
> certainly important. In fact, there has already been some theoretical
> resarch on what consequences this might have. There was already in 1984 an
> article by Stonebraker et al. on "QUEL as a data type": (QUEL being a
> query language.)
>
> http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=602287
>
> More recently there has been research on issues related to storing code as
> if it were data and which consequences that might have for the query
> language. (There's no point in storing something if you cannot query it.)
> To name a few:
>
> J. Van den Bussche, D. Van Gucht, and G. Vossen. Reflective programming in
> the relational algebra. Journal of Computer and System Sciences,
> 52(3):537--549, June 1996.
>
> S. Abiteboul, C.H. Papadimitriou, and V.Vianu. The power of the reflective
> relational machine. In Proceedings IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer
> Science, pp. 230--240, Paris, France (1994).
>
> Towards practical meta-querying
> Authors: Bussche, Jan Van den; Vansummeren, Stijn; Vossen, Gottfried
> http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai:arXiv.org:cs/0202037
>
> Not that this directly connects to what you are talking about, but it
> shows that the idea has already popped up before and is recognized as
> relevant and interesting.

Many thanks for the references which I shall find my way through over the next duration.

-- 
Pete Brown
Falls Creek
OZ
www.mountainman.com.au