Cool new Free software

Your "contorted language" is spot on. Basically, in relational you cannot STORE that most natural of data concepts, the list. You have to MODEL it. At which point your database becomes unnecessarily complex and complicated.

Referring back to the comment in your earlier post about "You can either read everything from many different "tables" or you can just store every piece of data multiple times. With relational databases you can also denormalize data, but they are usually less flexible as to how it is stored."

But that's exactly what Pick does! NFNF is what relational purists would call "denormalised". The fact that it can be mechanically normalised by the DB seems to have passed them by. So in Pick, I don't "read from many tables OR store the data many times", I just store the data ONCE in ONE table. imho it is *relational* that needs to "store the data many times in many tables" - just try to store a list, then ask yourself how many times you have to store the name of the list (or its id, the same thing...) As a system that requires (as part of its definition) that you don't store duplicate data, the relational system is very poor at living up to its own definition!

Cheers,
Wol