Re: Objects and Relations

"Bob Badour" <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:2aFAh.6379$R71.96054_at_ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca...
>> And that's it. That's how we work everyday. If we ever have to do deal
>> with items that are indistinguishable by anything but physical
>> location (or any characteristic we can't keep track of), we tag them
>> with a surrogate identifier to represent their unique nature. It's
>> just common sense really.
>>
>> As an addendum, once implemented a surrogate key becomes a natural
>> key. I find this fascinating - it seems somehow analagous to "Nature
>> abhoring a vacuum".
>
> I think it has more to do with the human drive to communicate.

I struggle with that. If, for some reason, I choose to say (just) that, "I have a tin of cat food, and its name shall be 1345235", what have I communicated? No one in the real world could ever point it out and say, "Hey! There goes 1345235." And nor could I.

I do see that I could do something like count all the times I've asserted something about a tin of cat food called 1345235 but it seems to me that I've gained that apparent ability without being able to validate the truth of my testimony about the real world. It seems to me that the ability to refer back to the real world, at least in principle, should be important.

Roy Received on Wed Feb 14 2007 - 16:14:41 CET