Re: Table based programming.

Malcolm McLean wrote:
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?


Have you any experience with xBASE tables, usually .DBF files? They've been around for nearly thirty years and are the basis for dBASE, FoxPro, Clipper, xHarbour, et. al.

Practical or not, it is doable and perhaps interesting.

--
Joe Wright
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
--- Albert Einstein ---
.

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