What is a predicate?

Question

Being a hobbyist coder, I\'m lacking some fundamental knowledge. For the last couple days I\'ve been reading some stuff and the word \"predicate\" keeps reappearing. I\'d ve

Answer 1

First let's take a look at a regular dictionary and see what it says about what a predicate is:

Oxford American Dictionary(1980):

n. a part of a sentence that says something about the grammatical subject, as "is short" in "life is short"

Here is another sentence: "John is tall." the predicate is "is tall". As you can see it modifies or describes the subject, another term that is similar to predicate is adjective. In essence it's a modifier.

IBM's technology glossary provides several definitions but, the one fits best is this one:

An expression used as part of a filter, consisting of a data item, an operator, and a value

Here is an example using SQL:

SELECT name
FROM tableA
WHERE name = "john";

The predicate in this code would be name = "john". It has all the components of the IBM definition and also fits with the regular definition of predicate. The subject being name and the predicate being name = "john".