A practical functional programming system for databases
Peter Buneman, Rishiyur S. Nikhil, Robert E. Frankel · 1981
Functional programming systems, although they have nice theoretical properties and elegant implementations, have failed to make any significant impact in the practical world of applications programming. We shall describe a simple FP system for databases that is gaining considerable practical use as an interface language for complex database management systems. Not only does it provide a concise formalism for database queries but the implementation, which is done by a lazy evaluator, in many cases produces more efficient queries than conventional query systems because it reduces the amount of i/o. We also suggest that the implementation technique may be more generally applicable to FP systems.