finin@PRC.UNISYS.COM (Tim Finin) (01/27/88)
AI Seminar UNISYS Knowledge Systems Paoli Research Center Paoli PA Can We Combine Object-Oriented and Database Programming Languages? Peter Buneman Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania The inadequate expressive power of the relational data model for many database representation tasks -- especially those that do not conform to requirements of traditional data processing -- has led several database systems developers to adopt an alternative "object-oriented" approach to the representation of data. But if we do this, must we necessarily sacrifice the the high-level languages and the considerable implementation technology that have been developed for relational databases? I shall argue that if we take a more liberal attitude to what a relation is, we can generalize relational languages, and even some of the ideas in relational database design, to work for sets of objects. A closely related problem is how we represent sets of objects as typed values in a programming language. If we can find such a representation, can data types be checked statically as in languages like Pascal and Ada, or must we live with the difficulties and dangers of run-time type checking? Some recent results by Atsushi Ohori indicate that it is not only possible to do static type checking, but that the types can be automatically inferred: the programmer does not even have to declare the data types! 2:00 pm Wednesday, February 3, 1988 BIC Conference Room Unisys Paloi Research Center Route 252 and Central Ave. Paoli PA 19311 -- non-Unisys visitors who are interested in attending should -- -- send email to finin@prc.unisys.com or call 215-648-7446 --