Re: Homoiconic relational programming language

On Mar 8, 7:40 pm, hoodwill <chase.saund..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 8, 5:14 am, Nilone <rea..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Any thoughts, ideas, references - I'd like to hear them.
>
> I've seen a lot of movement towards structured representations of
> programs (examples can be provided on request), but no proposals to
> use a relational structure.  The projects that are getting anywhere
> seem to preserve a traditional text-based editing option.
>
> I am generally in favor of relational everything, but I would note
> that traditionally program text has been consistently hierarchical in
> structure.  Things that can safely stay hierarchical may be things
> that don't need relational representation.
>
> The relational notion that records have no set physical order, i.e.
> that order is not important to locating a record, may be another area
> where there is not a strong fit to programming - where the sequence of
> commands has traditionally been so important.

Thanks for your reply. Hierarchies can be represented in many forms in a relational model, and order can be expressed explicitly. Furthermore, making these assumptions explicit may help us re-evaluate traditional issues such as concurrency. Received on Mon Mar 08 2010 - 19:21:34 CET