M
Malcolm McLean
I want this to be a serious, fruitful thread. Sabateurs will be plonked.
Table-based programming is a new paradigm, similar to object-orientation,
procedural decomposition, or functional programming.
The idea is that all the data in the program comes in "tables". A table
consists of records and fields, and is thus a 2d entry. Fields may be
numbers or strings, and have names, descriptors, prevalidation conditions
and postvalidation conditions, and the like.
Note that this means that each field in the table is described by a "data
dictionary" which is itself a table, with one record for each field.
Tables are completely transparent to disk caching, sharing, database
support, and the like. They can have tiny of massive numbers of records.
There are no other structures. Queues, stacks, trees and the like are things
that you do to tables, not the format that the table is in. The idea is
that, given a dictionary, you can write automatic editors, viewers, savers
and things like that. So most code can be reused. They are designed with
business applications in mind, but could be used more broadly.
Now obviously C is not a "table-based programming language" and has no build
in support. However paradigms are independent of the language they are
implemented in.
My question is, is it practical to design a "TABLE" library for C?
Table-based programming is a new paradigm, similar to object-orientation,
procedural decomposition, or functional programming.
The idea is that all the data in the program comes in "tables". A table
consists of records and fields, and is thus a 2d entry. Fields may be
numbers or strings, and have names, descriptors, prevalidation conditions
and postvalidation conditions, and the like.
Note that this means that each field in the table is described by a "data
dictionary" which is itself a table, with one record for each field.
Tables are completely transparent to disk caching, sharing, database
support, and the like. They can have tiny of massive numbers of records.
There are no other structures. Queues, stacks, trees and the like are things
that you do to tables, not the format that the table is in. The idea is
that, given a dictionary, you can write automatic editors, viewers, savers
and things like that. So most code can be reused. They are designed with
business applications in mind, but could be used more broadly.
Now obviously C is not a "table-based programming language" and has no build
in support. However paradigms are independent of the language they are
implemented in.
My question is, is it practical to design a "TABLE" library for C?