Re: atomic

dawn wrote:
> On Nov 1, 6:24 pm, paul c <toledobythe..._at_ooyah.ac> wrote:

>> Roy Hann wrote:
>>
>> ...
>>
>>> Two indentical-looking tuples can mean entirely different things.  I can
>>> think of any number of meanings for {Roy, 47}.  Maybe it's my name and age.
>>> Or my name and the number of illegitimate children I have.  Or maybe it's my
>>> father's name and his house number.  Who knows, until I tell you?
>>> Roy
>> I'm still looking for an example of a predicate that uses RVA's where an
>> empty RVA in a tuple makes sense.

This is the trouble with English, which I believe has hundreds of thousands more words than any other language, possibly because most of them were stolen from other languages but that's beside the point.

In ordinary talk, it is so deceptively easy to include the ordinary adjective "optional" when talking about predicates while ignoring the traditional sense of logical predicates that involves quantifiers. Things might be clearer if all db talk was conducted in Latin. But I'd say it should be or the other, not like CJ Date mixing in his "mutatis mutandis" and so forth with his English. Received on Sat Nov 03 2007 - 16:49:04 CET