[cap-talk] capabilities for databases and database-like systems

[David Hopwood]

John Carlson wrote:
> David Hopwood wrote:
>> John Carlson wrote:
>>
>>> Forgive me if my terminology is not polished
>>> by years of study in capability systems.  I was
>>> just trying to get across the point that
>>> capabilities can provide access to more than just objects,
>>> they can refer to sentences in a query language
>>> (and sentences are objects) which return data
>>> from a database or modify a database.
>>
>> Precisely; any implementable operation or set of operations can
>> be expressed as an object. It seems that some people don't
>> naturally think of arbitrary services when they hear the word
>> "object". I'm not sure that there is any better term that would
>> not introduce other unwanted assumptions, though.
> 
> I'm sure you're going to tell me that verbs can be viewed as objects as 
> well.

Yes.

> I don't want to gerundify everything in computer science.
> It's precisely the verb sense that I want to get across.  Let's focus
> on query and manipulate, the operators, not on statements or sentences.

I'm not suggesting that *everything* be a command/verb-like object. Just
use such objects whenever it is good design to do so (by normal design
criteria like security, simplicity, flexibility, efficiency etc.)

-- 
David Hopwood <david.nospam.hopwood at blueyonder.co.uk>