Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
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Tony Williams interviews Chris Date (presumably by e-mail), in promotion of Date's new book for O'Reilly, Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners. Date sounds like my kind of tightass: check out this exchange, in which he corrects an abbreviated reference by Williams before answering the question:
Tony: The Third Manifesto introduced the relational language Tutorial D, and you use it for the examples in the new book. Do you think it has a future as an implementation or do you never intend it to be implemented?
Chris: Again I'd like to clarify a couple of things up front. First, I'd like to explain what The Third Manifesto is. It is a formal proposal by Hugh Darwen and myself for the future of data and data management systems. It's a fairly short document (maybe 12 pages); it's also pretty terse and, to be frank, not all that easy to understand. So Hugh and I wrote a book of some 500 pages (!) to explain it. The third edition of that book (Databases, Types, and the Relational Model: The Third Manifesto) is due to be published late this year or early next year. And the first confusion factor is that people often refer to that book, loosely, as The Third Manifesto—but it really isn't; in fact, the Manifesto proper constitutes just one chapter in the book. Now in the Manifesto proper we—I mean Hugh Darwen and myself—use the name D generically to refer to any database language that conforms to the principles laid down in the Manifesto. Note that there could be any number of distinct languages that all qualify as a valid D. (Perhaps I should say explicitly in passing that SQL is not one of them!) And in the Manifesto book we introduce a particular D, which we call Tutorial D, that's meant to be used as (we hope) a self-explanatory basis for illustrating relational ideas—self-explanatory in the sense that if you're familiar with any conventional programming language, you should have no difficulty in following it.... However, Tutorial D is, in a sense, only a "toy" language; it has no I/O and no exception-handling and is incomplete in various other ways as well. It follows that Tutorial D per se could never serve as a true industrial-strength language. But that doesn't mean we don't want to see it implemented! We believe it could serve as an extremely useful vehicle for teaching and reinforcing relational concepts before students have to get their heads bent out of shape from having to learn SQL. (Thanks to blogdex.) posted: 8:51:15 PM |
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We have a full cast: Tiffany is onboard to play Ginger, Casey to play Reverend Groves (both from Six Degrees), Art to play Sheriff Atkins, and David J. to play Earl. David J. was in my first Montgomery Playhouse show, it must be ten years ago now. We've blocked all of the french scenes (for an 80-page play, there are a squillion of them), and we did a stumble-through of the first act last night, adding in the choral scene introductions. I am about half-way off book, but I been putting off working on the long showdown scene between Boyd and Rev. Groves in Act II. That scene is almost Shavian in the way that Wilson sets up his two most articulate, most antagonistic characters, and gives them a jaw-jaw for five dang pages. Karen and I have chatted about Boyd's backstory a bit. I think I've convinced her that Boyd isn't bisexual (he's enough of a mess without that burden). He does have some issues with authority, for sure, be it movie producers, the IRS, or small town law enforcement officials. Oh, by the way, if you want to stay on my good side, remember that the name of the play is Book of Days. No "The," no "A" in front. posted: 8:37:18 PM |
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And yet more manikin material: 30 seconds of normal-speed video of the male's noise-making (not the high-speed video that Bostwick made). (Thanks to Casey.) posted: 6:13:30 PM |
 D. Gorsline, Proprietor
   
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