Re: atomic

From: paul c <toledobythesea_at_ooyah.ac>
Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:49:04 GMT
Message-ID: <QL0Xi.170513$Da.76406_at_pd7urf1no>


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.

>
> I suspect that makes sense to me might not to you ;-) but I'll toss
> out an optional list of keywords in a predicate as a possible empty
> RVA in a tuple. Another example is OtherLastNames, FormerLastNames or
> AliasLastNames. One row in the tuple might include only a "maiden
> name" for a person, another might have two other last names used by
> this person (other than the value of LastName in this row) and a third
> might be the empty set. HTH --dawn
>

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

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