Re: Introducing PlayDB (The Model, The Language, The DBMS)

In an attempt to throw the authorities off his trail, seunosewa_at_inaira.com (Seun Osewa) transmitted:
> "Bob Badour" <bbadour_at_golden.net> wrote:
> SELF is a classless programming Language, claims to be object oriented
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_computer_language
> http://research.sun.com/self/language.html
> http://research.sun.com/research/self/release_4.0/Self-4.0/Tutorial/index.html
>
> A lot of ideas about making a typeless Object-Oriented database system
> workable would be learned. i am on it.

SELF isn't "typeless;" the only language I recall that _claimed_ to be such was BCPL (predecessor to B and C), and even there, that wasn't honestly typeless; it was instead pretty "loose" about them.

Perl and TCL both have a history of pretending "typelessness;" their scalars can be coerced into pretending that they are strings or numbers depending on what operation you use on them. Mind you, since they have aggregate 'types' it's again not honest to call them "typeless;" they are more 'schizophrenic about types.' (Which is sometimes a big pain.)

What could be of _some_ merit would be to have a system that is 'type agnostic;' that is, you have containers/slots in which you can put any type. That's sort of what Self does; that's _certainly_ characteristic of the Lisp family. The latter is strongly typed, but common data structures allow plunking in data of any type, in contrast with (say) ML.

Whether or not this is any good for databases is another question. The _problem_ with being open to a "loose" set of types is that there then needs to be code to interpret the different types.

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