[seam-dev] Seam 2.1.1.CR2

[Francisco Jose Peredo]

Gavin King escribió:
> Sorry, but tutorial D handles nulls even worse than SQL: i.e. it
> doesn't have them, which means that in tutorial D, you have to
> represent an unknown value by some totally ad hoc "special value" of a
> non-null type. i.e. you have to define something like -666:=null in a
> totally arbitrary and ad hoc manner. They seriously recommend this in
> their books.
>   
I agree with you that the idea of completly getting rid of null in D is
not practical, but SQL should make it easier for us to avoid using nulls
unless we really need to do so.
> The completely broken treatment of null by those guys is one reason
> why I simply take very little they say seriously. (The other reason is
> that they don't seem to understand typing very well.)
>   
Well Null treatment for nulls in SQL isn't that great too... ;-)
> Frankly, they bamboozle folks who don't know much math with some
> absurdly overblown mathematical formalism that is totally unnecessary
> for representing the mathematically trivial problems that occur in
> databases. Since I actually have a background in higher math, I'm not
> intimidated by that stuff and I can see straight through their silly
> arguments. These guys are poseurs (if you read their resumes, they
> don't actually have a mathematics background).
>   
I do not care about higher math either, but you have to admit that Sql
has too many flaws (http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?SqlFlaws) and not having
a very confortable syntax is certainly one of them (specially if you are
looking for maintainability and reutilization in you query code). Seeing
some of the different syntax proposed by D based alternatives reflected
in HQL could help alleviate this problem... but I realize that
discussing that is offtopic in this forum.