[ic] Question about ic data schema

[Matt Flaherty]

Hi,

In looking at the Construct demo and the ic documentation, I've noticed that
the schema violates 1st Normal Form. For example, the table "cat" has a
field "sel" that takes what appears to be a space-delimited list of numbers
representing keys into the table "area", and the product table links to cat
as product.category = cat.name, which is not unique. Are these performance
related optimizations, perhaps with GDBM in mind? Could anyone explain the
rationale? I'd like to understand the thinking that went into the design
before I think about tinkering with it. It's difficult to see what's going
on in a denormalized database, and the docs don't really explain. Thanks, I
appreciate any help.

Matt Flaherty