Marshall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We seem to have slipped back from the hypothetical relation language > with only assignement back to SQL.
I missed the point where we started discussing such a language. I suspect it was while some of us were still operating under the misconception that you assignment to attributes of tuples, rather than to entire relations. I don't see how such a language (limited to assignment of entire relations) is particularly helpful to consider. If the relations are to be considered opaque, then there's clearly no aliasing going on. However, such a language doesn't seem to solve any actual problems. It appears to be nothing other than a toy language, with a fixed finite set of variables having only value semantics, no scope, etc. I assume that relational databases will have the equivalent of SQL's update statement; and if that's not the case, then I would need someone to explain how to accomplish the same goals in the new relational language; i.e. it would need some way of expressing transformations of relations, not just complete replacement of them with new relations that are assumed to appear out of thin air. -- Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer / Technical Trainer MindIQ Corporation -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
