Re: More on lists and sets

David Cressey wrote:
>
> [...] If you have already made the decision that what you want is a
> declarative manipulation language then what you say is true. It's not clear
> to me that programmers really want that. Or that they should want that if
> they don't.

I guess this depends upon whether you are designing a query language, i.e., a language in which we issue a request to a database, or a programming language i.e., a language we tell the client to compute something. For a query language declarativeness is a must-have because only that way the DBMS has enough room to do query optimization and achieve data independence. For a programming language declarativeness may or may not be a good idea, depending on what the programmer is trying to achieve.

So you are thinking about a non-declarative programming language and you want to integrate sets and lists there? Would that not largely be a matter of coming up with the right libraries / class definitions?

• Jan Hidders