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A Practical Functional Programming System for Databases

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Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFPCA '81 Proceedings of the 1981 conference on Functional programming languages and computer architecture
PublisherACM Press
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)0-89791-060-5
Publication statusPublished - 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.

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