Re: approaches for embedding a data language in a general purpose language
Date: 10 Oct 2006 23:09:45 -0700
Message-ID: <1160546985.449754.247300_at_i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
On Oct 10, 6:18 pm, "David Cressey" <dcres..._at_verizon.net> wrote:
>
> There is no particular reason why a language couldn't embrace both the
> functions and operations needed for relational data manipulation and also
> the functions and operations needed for general purpose programming tasks.
> There is no particular reason why such a language shouldn't be developed.
Sure; I'm completely signed up to this idea. In fact you could say I'm
actively
pursuing it, in what is colloquially known as my "copious spare time."
> How quickly such a language would be adopted by either DBAs or programmers
> remains to be seen.
Language popularity is not well understood. Very tricky question.
> I'm not sure about legacy systems. Can you explain that in a little more
> detail?
Sure.
Suppose you create a new language that is both a general purpose
programming
language (Turing complete, able to code any computable function,
various
modern language features) and also a first-rate data language (joins,
aggregates,
imperative statements, etc.) Let's just assume you do a good job and
many
people agree that it's awesome, and they want to use it instead of SQL,
even
when connecting to their existing SQL databases. (With appropriate
connectors,
it would be possible.)
But few people will be in a position to move to using the new language
in
a homogeneous way. Most will have a substantial investement in existing
codebases. They have lots of Java and C++, probably. (Lots of SQL too
but let's ignore that for now.) Maybe (in an enterprise setting) they
commission a new database using the new DBMS that supports the
new language natively. They'll still have a lot of existing databases
managed with SQL DBMSs. An existing application, written in C++ or
Java might grow to need to access the new database, and maybe
they want to use the new language to do it. You have to have some
way to embed the new language in C++ and Java, the way you can
embed SQL in C++ and Java today.
Something like that anyway. There will likely be many scenarios that require various forms of interoperability.
Marshall Received on Wed Oct 11 2006 - 08:09:45 CEST