> S.Isaac Dealey wrote:
>>>Say I'm a Spaniard or Hispanophone. Plurals in Spanish
>>>always end in
>>>-es. Is using plurals for tables names more consistant in
>>>Spanish than
>>>English? Of course not.
>>
>> Assuming that statement is true, yes it does. I was
>> talking about
>> syntactical consistency, in which, if I have a rule that
>> all names are
>> appended with x, then that is a consistent syntactical
>> rule. If I then
>> amend my rule to say that "all names are appended with x
>> -- except for
>> names we don't feel like appending with x" (which is how
>> the rules for
>> plurals in English work) then the syntax rule is
>> inconsistent.
> That appears overly rigid to me. The only reason why
> there's
> "inconsistency" in English plurals is phonological. -s and
> -es are both
> the same morpheme.
> If you were to ask a linguist if there was inconsistency
> here, they'd
> definitely say "no".
You can't remove the argument from its context (programming syntax)
and expect the argument to continue to be valid. It might but that
would be a non-sequitur.
>> There is no way of automating the rule -- it requires
>> manual entry of a
>> "dictionary" to explain what names are random exceptions
>> to the rule
>> -- and that's really the whole point -- plurals in
>> english are
>> arbitrarily random. A consistently applied syntax rule
>> may be
>> abritrary but is not random.
> It's rather simple, and doesn't require a special rule, at
> least not for
> native germanic words (and a good deal of the romance ones
> and others in
> the language, spare the odd irregular ones like "oxen",
> "children", and
> the strong nouns). If a world ends in a sibilant (s, z,
> sh, x [really
> "ks"], ch [really "tsh"]); the soft "g" is also a
> sibilant, but owing to
> other complications doesn't really figure in this), -es is
> used. If it
> ends in -y, -ies is used. Otherwise -s. It's quite simple.
For a human being, yes. But it's not simple to create an automated,
mechanical means of pluralising words in english. If I wanted to
automate the relationship between my CFC class names and my tables and
I used singular class names and plural table names, how would you
write this function:
function makePlural(noun) { ... }
With the assumption that the function _must_ accept any noun in the
Oxfard English dictionary.
> You'll notice that "person" and "people" are not related.
> You'll also
> notice that "people" is a collective noun, not a plural.
> The plural of
> person is, wait for it, "persons".
>> goose/geese, mouse/mice).
> Irregular nouns. Give us a break!
And a synonym of irregular is ... wait for it ... "inconsistent".
>>>It could be -anna, -�, -e, -a, the noun could undergo
>>>palatalisation of the final consonant, &c. Does this make
>>>using
>>>pluralisation more consistant in English than Gaelic?
>>>Nope.
>>
>> Yep.
> This goidelophone wishes to disagree.
That's because this goidelophone isn't a stupid computer... A stupid
computer doesn't know better. A stupid computer would say it's
inconsistent.
>>>But when it comes down to it, this is all convention. I
>>>pluralise
>>>because bits of SQL like "SELECT ... FROM products ...",
>>>"INSERT INTO
>>>products ...", "UPDATE products ...", and "DELETE FROM
>>>products ..."
>>>read better than me because these work on sets of
>>>entities as opposed
>>>to singular entities. When it comes down to it, how it
>>>"sounds" is
>>>really the only way of justifying it.
>>
>> It's not the only reason, but it's the reason most
>> commonly
>> understood. (Re: previous post regarding automation of
>> table names).
> And we write code for humans to understand, not computers.
Imo it's no harder (for a human) to understand and write code against
a singular noun than it is to write it against a plural noun,
regardless of the context. But personally, I like to reduce my
workload -- reducing my workload means automating tasks (which in turn
means reducing or eliminating inconsistencies) -- if a task can be
automated easily with one syntactical mechanism and not with another,
I'm going to weigh that in favor of the syntax which can be easily
automated. I may not ultimately choose that syntax, but it's a
significant factor.
>> Really if you want to run the length of the argument then
>> you could
>> just as easily name your classes plural as well, and
>> technically a
>> class does describe a collection of objects (their type),
>> though when
>> we write code we don't generally think of a class that
>> way, we think
>> of it as being singular even though we then instantiate
>> objects to
>> create what are actually singular entities of type.
> A class is not a collection of objects. A class is is a
> description of a
> type of object. Table != class. That's a red herring.
A table describes it's contents by it's properties (columns) and their
types. A class describes the objects which belong to the class by its
properties and their types. True, a table doesn't have methods, and we
generally think of it as being a container, but ultimately either a
table or a class is a set of meta-data which describes, structures and
manages many individual items (records or object instances). No a
table is not a class -- but the argument can be made that they are
both sub-classes of the same structural concept (with different
interfaces and/or overloaded methods).
s. isaac dealey 954.522.6080
new epoch : isn't it time for a change?
add features without fixtures with
the onTap open source framework
http://macromedia.breezecentral.com/p49777853/
http://www.sys-con.com/author/?id=4806
http://www.fusiontap.com
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