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Re: Future of Databases

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>, xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Future of Databases
• From: Bill Lindsey <bill@b...>
• Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 22:34:19 -0700
• References: <LFZWTQ85TPQMGLFDQNZXBA4Z2XE9A.3cc83ac0@MChamp>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011128 Netscape6/6.2.1

Mike Champion wrote:

> So, I can kinda, sortof see a programming model that handles declarative
> stuff easily, encourages a functional programming style, handles both 
> XML and relational data "natively", and allows data to be either encapsulated
> in objects (or aspects?) or exposed for generic manipulation.  Whether
> XQuery is that model is quite another question.


Sounds a little like the direction we were headed at
B-Bop in designing the protocol for interacting with
our XML database.  We built a language, expressible in
XML (and another syntax) which allowed fetching from and
writing to URI's, databases and our own repository.  It
integrated closely with XSLT, was fully composable, and other
than the writing of outputs, was strictly functional and
side effect free.

Parameters were pushed down into "functions" through an
evaluation context, and results came back up as SAX events.

Developers who got their hands on it seemed to get a 

kick out of the power this gave them to build rather
complex data processing without ever touching procedural
code.

At one point, our reference manual started with the
epigraph: "Programmers who fail to learn the lessons
of Lisp are doomed to reimplement it."   I wish I could
find the proper attribution for that quote.

-Bill

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