Re: 3 value logic. Why is SQL so special?

"Roy Hann" <specially_at_processed.almost.meat> wrote in message news:iMadnbCjtMr1c47YRVnysQ_at_pipex.net...
> "JOG" <jog_at_cs.nott.ac.uk> wrote in message
> news:1158932058.064002.166820_at_b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> > It is surely not a case of whether 3VL is tractable or not, but more a
> > question of why the hell would one want to add complexity where it is
> > unintuitive and unneeded?
>
> Unintuitive indeed. I just delivered my briefing that I mentioned here a
> few days ago. Nullability was one of the subjects I intended to address
and
> I did quite a long preamble to it that was good enough that my audience
> hardly murmured at my claim that one can eliminate the "need" to make many
> attributes nullable by properly discriminating fact types and using
several
> tables instead of one. But when I went on to argue that many remaining
> nullable attributes need not be nullable at all it set off a passionate
> discussion about uncertainty and how to represent tentatively proposed
> "facts" in the database otherwise.
>
> It soon became clear that most of the (very intelligent) people in the
room
> had a notion that maximum uncertaintly does not lie exactly midway between
> true and false, but somewhere else entirely! Which seems pretty
unintuitive
> alright.
>
> Roy
>
>
Received on Fri Sep 22 2006 - 17:53:04 CEST