Original Message
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From: "Nando Dessena" <nandod2@...>

> FWIW, I don't like that much the idea of having access to
> library functions without declaring them. I don't know of
> any programming language that permits it. Surely it would
> help in the case you want to provide functions which look
> like the predefined (internal) ones, but I don't see it a
> big advantage.

Actually there are plenty of functions already natively included in
Interbase. Bill is suggesting a method of extending those (and possibly even
overriding them?) on a system wide basis. I love this idea. There are plenty
of functions that I would like to give my users access to. I work in a
company that does a lot of data manipulation and analysis work. This is a
different environment to a development one (which we also do). Users of the
database (SQL mostly) are not expert programmers or sysadmins so when
functions they are used to having access to go away they find this confusing
and frustrating. I would immediately set up an environment where this could
not happen if I had access to system wide configuration of external function
libraries.

I believe the sugestion Bill is making is not to remove the capacity to do
this on a database by database basis but to ADD the capacity to define them
on a system wide level. Almost like inheritance. In fact I would like to see
a capacity to group these function definitions into functional units and
then assign them to the system or a particular database depending on its
purpose. For example a financial reporting database might be allocated a set
of functions for handling quarters etc.

Actually I am starting to see how an XML representation of the configuration
data would make this particularly easy. Hmmmm...

Cheers
Adam Clarke