"Ted Byers" writes:
interruptions are not tolerable (at least in most situations I have seen)
and no-one interrupts because everyone there knows that any interruption in
many procedures will result in the entire effort being scrapped and started
over.

You must be fond of souffles.

they are of no help with things like Grandma's favourite butter tart recipe,
or with my efforts to modify it so that the revised version doesn't put my
blood sugar ten times higher than it is supposed to be. And on checking, I

I guess you have a problem with the apples themselves, then.

diet). She would complain that she didn't know what or how to cook for him
because it seemed that no matter what she prepared, someone told her that he
couldn't eat it because it was bad for him. It seemed to me that if she had
had a product like this, and obtained instructions from her physician
regarding what the minimum and maximum daily intake for each nutrient should
be given Dad's health, she could rather easily find recipes and construct
meal plans that would have met Dad's dietary needs. But in adition to those

You are now assuming that we know the full and final truth about
nutritional needs.

If you look ten years back in time, it is easy to see how things have
progressed. I can't see any reason why todays answers aren't wrong
tomorrow.

This is why I think most people should eat a varied diet. People who
tell you to eat something or other usually have a book to sell.

Isn't everyone's? Almost all of the development I have done in recent years
has been in C++ and very object oriented. I do do some structured and

C++ went out of style around here in the early 1990s. Come to think of
it, it never really took off. Awful language, by the way. It feels
like C with a huge great big roof rack on top where are the objects
are kept, making the whole thing waddle through corners.

Java, I find the object model in VB seriously broken and the Java runtime a
major performance problem (but Java is a very interesting language - it just
doesn't have much utility in the kinds of programming I do).

Performance problem? Strange. I can't see more than a 10 or 20%
degradation over using vanilla C. CPUs are inexpensive. Out-of-control
pointer bugs are not.

I wouldn't use Java for low-level OS stuff. For a recipe database, I
think it is a good match. That may be because I use Java every day.

Are you familiar with SQL? If so, how would an XML database provide an
advantage over combining SQL with C++ and perhaps COM/DCOM? I can see how

The query bits of SQL is a relational query language. If something
can't be expressed in terms of static relations, you are out of luck.

The inverse problem also applies - XML is, IMNSHO, truly awful at
efficient static relations.

XQuery may be what XML bigots are waiting for. I am not holding my
breath. I will build the best solutions I can right now with the tools
that are available.

one can relatively easily find all objects satisfying your search criterion
using SQL and C++ and a suitable class inheritance tree (and one of the
things making it easy is the availability of the STL in C++ and the power of
SQL).

How do you propose to do this while at the same time allowing the
user to define his own relations? You place some constraints on the
top-level nodes ("I want a keywords node around here somewhere if it
exists") the rest is left as a user-defined application space.

I sincerely hope you are not telling me you want to create tables for
every node the user may want to dream up on the fly. That
would be maintenance hell.

Many people split things. The topmost information is kept in
relational tables, the rest is put into blobs or object databases as
XML or something else that may be adapted by the user.

Geir