Towards an Integrated Query/Programming Language for Object Bases: a Broad Outlook

We present general principles of modern programming languages and discuss requirements which have to be observed during the development of integrated object-oriented query/programming languages and their theories. The requirements stem mostly from aesthetic criteria, but we argue they have the fundamental meaning for pragmatic aspects of such languages. We propose a basis for building systems satisfying these requirements. In this basis the role of an environment stack and naming-scoping-binding issues is central. Object-oriented database query/programming languages require modifications of the construction of the classical programming languages' stack. In particular, they need the separation of the stack from an object store, as well as macroscopic binding. This makes it possible to define query operators directly by operations on the stack. Such a query language can be easily integrated with macroscopic imperative statements, programming abstractions (procedures, views, modules), and..