Database programming languages
Jurgen Annevelink · 1991
This paper introduces the Iris Programming Language (IPL), a functional embedding of OSQL, the query language of Iris, an object-oriented database system prototype developed by Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.The main contribution of this paper is to show how a declarative query language can be extended into a general purpose database programming language by embedding it into a functional programming language.The key to the approach is the capability of invoking an embedded interpreter from within the context of a query evaluation.The paper discusses the mechanism by which the Iris query interpreter was extended to provide this capability and discusses how such extensions can be added to relational database systems.IPL is a full-fledged programming language, that includes control abstractions and is compiled mto an intermediate, lambda calculus based language.IPL provides direct access to the operators of the underlying intermediate language, thus allowing it to be extended and specialized for a particular application domain.IPL is successfully implemented and is in active use.