An introduction and a plea ...
От | Emmanuel Charpentier |
---|---|
Тема | An introduction and a plea ... |
Дата | |
Msg-id | 20000206.17574200@localhost.localdomain обсуждение исходный текст |
Список | pgsql-hackers |
Dear pgsql-hackers list, First a few words of introduction : I'm 43 and, while I have been introduced to computing for a long time (my first exposure was a small Fortran exercise I wrote in '74 (!) for a timesharing system on an hardcopy terminal ...), my coding abilities are somewhat rusty. I am mainly a user by now, no longer a coder, and my interests in computers is now in making my life simpler (I'm a biostatistician, among other things).I probably won't be contributing any code to PostgreSQL. Some bug reports, maybe ... However, I've lurked on some of the PostgreSQL lists for 2 to 3 months (through the Web interface), and I feel that I might offer some advice, based on my past experience of seeing a lot of projects growing (or dying, due to feeping creaturism(TM) ...). So I will shamelessly pull my first plea, related to the proposed change to the default behaviour of PostgreSQL in querying classes with subclasses. I *strongly* suggest not to change anything in the default behaviour, which is what is expected from an SQL-compliant system, even if the database in question uses inheritance internally. The reason for that plea is that a modification would crash any program not explicitly written for inheritance features : such features might be used by, say, the administrator and coere programmers of a database, who are not necessarily publish this internal use of inheritance to end-users. Furthermore, such a change would forbid evolution of a database from a pure-relational to an object-orien,ted one : the two representations would be incompatible. It should also pointed out that most interface programs (such as ODBC or JDBC drivers) are not and will not in a foreseeable future be designed for use of these features. Modifying the default behaviour would break them. Apart from that, I am, after 17 years of exposure to the concepts of object-oriented programming, still to be convinced of the value of this paradigm. This is *not* to suggest that these developments should be left over ! However, I *feel* that the real issues behind this concept are not yet fully understood, and that some deep theoretical work remains to be done (in logic, for example : while the well-understood relational theory directly relates to set theory, I think that a mathematically correct objects-and-types theory shoud emanate from category theory but remains to be created ...). Your thoughs ? Emmanuel Charpentier
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