Squid -- or how to represent OO methods in Oracle

I'm working on a master's thesis project -- Squid, an object-oriented front end for Oracle. Squid object instances have features which can be either attributes or methods. All features can be designated as public, protected, or private. I'm having trouble figuring out how to implement Squid methods (which resemble functions in C pretty closely) in Oracle. Some of my questions are:

1. can the "grant privileges" feature be used to implement three levels of protection as described above? The book I'm reading on this is not too clear on how to do something like this.
2. I've seen procedures and packages of procedures described, and how an entire package can be made public. Can packages also be made private or protected?
3. Possibly there is a better way to implement methods than using Oracle procedures. I had considered making a "methods table", and storing either the code or the precompiled method so it could be referenced by any object instance with proper permissions. Does this sound like a more workable approach?

    Any tips, suggestions, or cautions would be greatly appreciated!

Carolyn Giberson
giber_at_pollux.cs.uga.edu
University of Georgia Received on Wed Jun 23 1993 - 02:23:15 CEST