----- Original Message ----
From: Colin Wetherbee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> My goal was as a
>> time/work saving measure (from the administration perspective) to
>> allow 'children' elements to have blank entries where the values
>> would get inherited down from parents.
>That makes sense. I haven't delved into the object-relational
>properties of databases, but I wonder if that kind of inheritance is
>easier to achieve than it seems?
>If the object-relational thing works out, you may not have to worry
>about recursion. I'd suggest investigating that route.
>If all else fails and you still want to keep these operations inside the
>database, stored procedures are great for that sort of thing.
Yeah, I actually considered the possibility of creating an accompanying object
model in something like perl or the like. perl has a nice capability of
'packing' it's variables, objects are just instances of 'blessed' subroutines
and subroutines are stored in hashes. So technically you could pack and store
the object instance itself although that would still require a little finess
and some recursive lookups at runtime to get the inheritance to work right.
But once stored in memory, the parents' info would be availble (but that sorta
tosses out the need for a DB other than to initialize the program memory.)
>As for the plural of "syntax", I don't think there is one, but it's
>likely possible to pluralize etymologically ancestral versions of it. :)
Yeah that became quite a joke as I was leaving the office yesterday. I did a
quick lookup after writing the email and couldn't find a plural for syntax. I
first looked at dictionaries - even foreign ones. I looked through more than a
dozen total. I then turned to google in general. Then it hit me that figuring
out what the plural of syntax is, is another form of syntax! So I was asking
everyone the proper syntax for pluralizing syntax! I received a plethora of
responses (there's another interesting one - what's the singular or plethora?
plethorum?) from syntax (self-plural), syntaxes, synti ... one person even
thought I said 'sin tax' and hid their pack of cigarettes.
SW
SW
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