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Thu 10th April, 2003: Erik Meijer
Computer Laboratory > Research > TSG > Logic and Semantics Seminar > Thu 10th April, 2003: Erik Meijer

Speaker: Erik Meijer, Microsoft Research
Title: Unifying the Object-Oriented, Relational and Hierarchical Data Models
Time: Thu 10th April, 2003, 14:00
Venue: William Gates Building, room FW11
Abstract:

Over the last couple of years my research has focused on growing languages to write typical three-tier programs that munge relational tables into hierarchical trees by means of an object-oriented or functional language.

The early attempts resulted in a family of domain specific embedded languages in Haskell. While the DSL approach is certainly elegant, it remained a purely academic exercise. In particular it is impossible to add new syntax (for example for XML literals), and more importantly, embedding foreign type-systems into the host language requires lots of tricky type hackery (phantom types, monads, rank-n polymorphism, ...) while still not achieving full fidelity.

More recently, I have therefore been investigating language and type-system extensions in an imperative object-oriented setting instead of embedding into a pure functional language. This talk will discuss the preliminary outcome of trying to unify the object-oriented, relational and hierarchical data-models by growing an object-oriented host language by adding streams (lazy lists), tuples (sequences), union and intersection types, closures, generalized member access (XPath queries) and joins (SQL select queries), and XML literals.