Re: MV and SQL

"x" <x_at_not-exists.org> wrote in message news:dql96p$l4u$1_at_domitilla.aioe.org...
>
> "x" <x_at_not-exists.org> wrote in message
> news:dql1mk$a33$1_at_domitilla.aioe.org...
>
>
> > The biggest feature of a MV system might be the possibility to define a
> > domain specific language and mascarading imperative code as data.
> > It seems that imperative code and data are tightly coupled which is
> exactly
> > the opposite of what usually happen in an SQL system.
>
> LISP with a persistent list storage is the perfect DBMS.
>
>

This also reminds me of MDL.

Incidentally, I blew it when I called it MDL yesterday. It turns out that the acronym MDL has been used multiple times, and refers to very different things. when I did a search, the best one I came up with was "My Dream Language", in a website that documents "the language wars" in a way that I find hilarious.

The particular MDL I was talking about was "MAC's Data Language" or "the MIT Design Language", dpending on who you listen to. In reality, MDL was a sanitized form of the real name of the language: Muddle. I wanted to avoid calling it "muddle" because that was an instance of self-deprecating humor that is no longer in vogue.

Anyway, Muddle had a piece in it called "the association manager", written by Carl Hewitt. Carl Hewitt already had the idea for PLANNER in his mind at that time, and I think his participation in the Muddle project allowed him to put some of his ideas to the test, before building a real PLANNER. PLANNER, in turn, had an influence on Alan Kay, who invented Smalltalk.

Anyway, the association manager managed associations between thyings inside Muddle. An "atom" was simply an association between a name, a context, a type, and a value. I don't know the details of how that worked, but it worked well enough to meet the needs of the other parts of Muddle. And it implemented dynamic typing, if I've understood that term correctly. By the way, "comments" were implemented as associations as well, and, as an odd feature of the language, commments didn't have to be character strings, necessarily.

This doesn't address persistence, but the association manager could have added persistence (on disk and other storage) without upseting the other four parts of Muddle.

Muddle was popular at MIT project MAC for about ten years, after which its features were available in more mainstream products. Received on Wed Jan 18 2006 - 15:31:00 CET