SQL and the LGP-30

Thread view:

Roedy Green - 18 Jun 2004 07:37 GMT

You can see a picture of my first personal computer, an LGP-30 at
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/mindprod.com/equipment.html

It had no transistors, just tubes, a rotating drum, and a few diodes.

You programmed the thing with absolute addresses, a hex track and
sector number on the drum.

Programming with JDBC took be back to those thrilling days of
yesteryear. Every parameter is numbered, one based.

I can't believe the incompetence of this intefarce.

At the very least it should have named parameters in the
prepareStatement.

It is a nightmare trying to write code where the PreparedStatements
are nowhere near the code that has to used counted fieldnames in them.
You CAN'T proofread the damn things.

Further the debugging tools to figure out what is going on are
non-existent. You have to pepper your code with debug output to
narrow down where the problem is.

You can't even cut and paste into MySQL to test the SQL.

You'd think after 30 years or so they have got this stuff polished.

Signature

Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.

Reply to this Message

Roedy Green - 18 Jun 2004 08:44 GMT

>You'd think after 30 years or so they have got this stuff polished.

What needs to happen is a tighter integration of Java and SQL.

Then you could do compile time checking to make sure column names are
correct and the types of local variables could be generated from the
database. The syntax of prepared statements could be analysed and
verified at compile time.

It might be another layer similar to the way JSP is implemented.

SQL allows fully dynamic work that could not be type checked, but the
bread and butter stuff could be. It is much like Java itself where
most of the time you can use typechecking, but for fully dynamic work
you can subvert the type system.

There is no reason not to lock the local variable names to being the
same as the column names.

Signature

Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming.
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.

Reply to this Message

SQL and the LGP-30

Free Magazines