Abstract
Database systems today have evolved a great deal from the first storage structures, towards greater data independence, expressive power in manipulation languages, and expressive power in data models. But their facilities are still poor substitutes for analogues in programming languages: data abstraction, structured control constructs and type systems respectively. Most programming languages, on the other hand, deal inadequately (if at all) with the question of long-lived structured data. The problem is compounded when dealing with both a database system and a programming language that are alien to each other (as is common today).
Functional programming languages with functional databases offer a clean solution to this problem. Functional programming languages are expressive, do not have destructive updates, and allow much parallelism. Functional databases are never destructively updated— rather, one views them as infinite sequences of versions.
After outlining the features of such a system, we discuss its many advantages pertaining to types, optimization, expressive power, and interactive environments.
This research was done at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Funding for this project was provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under the Office of Naval Research contract N00014-84-K-1025.
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Nikhil, R.S. (1988). Functional Databases, Functional Languages. In: Atkinson, M.P., Buneman, P., Morrison, R. (eds) Data Types and Persistence. Topics in Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61556-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61556-6_5
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