Re: storing survey answers of different data types

Joe Thurbon wrote:
...
> Yes, I doubt he (Roy) would. I've ended up down a similar path before as
> requirements came in to
> - be explicit in what types were permissible answers,
> - be able to automatically format presentation of the questions to the
> user,
> - automatically agregate scores across questions, etc
> ...
>

Some people who I think are very smart spend a lot of time trying to integrate types with programming languages, but I don't worry about it much, maybe I'm just too stupid to see their points. The only time I think about types is when I need to ask what is the type's operator for equality or whatever relationship a relational algebra needs to be told about in order to be precise about defining its operators. Maybe type inheritance offers human programming efficiencies but I think it's putting the cart before the horse when basic design is so often mangled, not to mention the technical loopholes in Codd's model. Personally, I don't even think a type system needs to be integrated with a language implementation. Received on Sun Apr 26 2009 - 03:33:55 CEST