Re: FW: Male/female

On Fri, Dec 08, 2006 at 04:50:16PM +0100, Alban Hertroys wrote:

> Why not use unicode symbols 0x2640 and 0x2642?
A clever idea, however, it does not cover

transsexual, female phenotype
transsexual, male phenotype
hermaphrodite, intersexual phenotype

which we (GNUmed, that is) need to support in a medical
database.

In fact, most (all?) of the approaches I have seen in this
thread lack that. Using bool would even preclude extension
of the constraint in that direction if it were ever needed.
So, one is better of with, say, char(2) or something
similar.

I would also suggest using a *coded* gender, not "male",
"female" strings which will make gender-based calculations a
lot easier down the road.

Karsten
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