A strongly typed, interactive object-oriented database programming language
Antonio Albano, Giorgio Ghelli, M. Eugenia Occhiuto, Renzo Orsini · CINECA IRIS Institutial research information system (University of Pisa) · 1986
Programming languages with data types have been used successfully to model databases with the abstraction mechanisms of a relational or semantic data model. The benefits of data types for modeling databases with an object-oriented database language has also been considered, but more research is required to isolate the basic features that the type system of the language should have, and to integrate the representation of abstract knowledge with the representation of concrete and procedural knowledge. The point of view is presented that, for a strongly typed programming language, the following features are relevant: a) a type system with concrete types, abstract data types with assertions and inheritance of operators from the representation type; b) the notion of type hierarchies; c) an object-oriented view of databases, where objects are the only values that can be created, destroyed, and updated. Examples will be given to show how the conceptual language Galileo might be modified to become a strongly typed, object-oriented database language.