Re: [ossig] Nothing exciting in Comp.Sci. anymore?

[Imran William Smith <iwsmith@xxxxxxxx>]

Dinesh Nair wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, Mukhsein Johari wrote:
> 
> 
>>So, now, when you learn about computer science, you learn about the file
>>as if it were an element of nature, like a photon. That's a dangerous
>>mentality. 
> 
> rubbish !
> 
> files are an incarnation of a data structure. if he dislikes them so much,
> then perhaps he should have presented another concept or methodology.
> 

Perhaps another methodology is the relational database model - all the data
you could want to store or manipulate becomes a row in a table
(a tuple in a relation if you've done CS and learnt
about the fundamentals, as defined by Mr Codd from IBM back in 1969, and barely
changed since).

But then, there's a simple mapping from a table to a file, and a row
to a line (just ask MySQL).  So anything you can do with an RDBMS, you
can do with a filesystem (although you might need to build atomic
locks etc - could also be implemented with files).

Perhaps it's most important that we learn about data structures.  Without
learning arrays, lists, hash tables and their features, a programmer
will write very code that cannot scale.  Even if you use 4GLs like SQL,
you may write inefficient code if you don't realise what the underlying
data structures look like.

Imran



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